From One Screen to the Next and the Next
A good video looking at the evolution towards the fourth screen
Twittervox, a show which I do under the name Warzabidul with the help of Loudmouthman of Loudmouthman.com now has a facebook page which I created earlier in the day. The point of this facebook is to bring together all those that have participated in the show so that they may discuss past and future program topics, from social media, through twitter rules and regulations and towards related topics like seesmic and Second life.
If you’re on twitter or seesmic and have a facebook account then come and join the conversation. We’re waiting for you.
Flight radar 24 is an iphone app that allows you to see where aircraft are on google maps. It shows the callsign, registration, altitude and a lot more. It is a fun app for plane spotters.
Sit on a city roof or at the top of a mountain and as you see a plane fly above you you will know where it’s coming from and where it’s going. Next time I have to pick someone up at the airport I will be using the flight tracker to know exactly where the plane is. Boredom will be of a different type.
The information about what the plane is doing is quite complete. The only thing missing would be a live radio feed of the ATC communications.
Recently I saw the question “Why can’t I charge my mobile phone while riding my scooter?” on Quora so I decided to provide the answer that you see below. In my eyes my answer is legitimate. As an ingress player, as a scooter driver, and as someone who has done what I describe in the answer below I do not see why it is not a valid answer. Quora and lateral thinking are not synonymous. It would seem that Quora users do not like lateral thinking.
This is a legitimate answer because within the ingress playing community everyone that I have met uses an external battery to recharge their phone whilst out and about. Some of them carry the battery in a pocket, others in a bag and yet more of them have a special case for the bike so that they can play the game with ease whilst moving from portal to portal. If you haven’t played Ingress on a bike then you should definitely try it.
To have a reasonable answer downvoted by a user of Quora degrades my motivation to contribute to the site. I was once threatened with a ban for providing a link to back up and source what I had written. A second time I had personal attacks for writing a question to a questions asking for thoughts on a topic and now I see this downvote to a legitimate answer.
Social networks and online communities should be about open and free discussions where peoples’ thoughts and opinions are valued. When they are not valued then the return on investment for community members declines. It also discourages people from contributing to the community. Ideally you should highlight what you like and ignore what you dislike. By ignoring what you dislike you offend no one. You discourage no one.
In the grand scheme of things I have had 153 upvotes and only one downvote that I am aware of. This should not discourage me from using the network in future. I will take a break from the social network once again. Other social networks are more inviting, more open, more stimulating.
Recently I reverted to Facebook due to the death of Twitter, but also because of the political bias I see on Mastodon instances. That political bias has encouraged me to take a break from that social network until the conflict is over.
Yesterday I saw that two people on Facebook discussed leaving Facebook just at the time when I am returning. I am returning for two reasons. The first is that with three billion people you’re more likely to find people who think like you do. It’s also about being local. I can spend thousands of hours on Mastodon, looking for conversations, and people, only to learn that they live thousands of kilometres away, and that they don’t want to meet in person anyway. It’s not that I want to meet in person, but that I like for the option to exist.
Another reason to use Facebook is that groups already exist. We don’t need to follow primitive hashtags and other sub-standard technologies. We can join a group, or like a page, and we see the discussion threads that are associated with that page or group.
Since the beginning of this month Europeans have become customers of Facebook, if they choose to be. If we want to we can pay 9CHF99 per month. Part of me things that this is disgusting and absurd. Why would we pay to be part of a network that plays with our sense of misery and unhappiness. The reason is that if, and when Facebook misbehaves, if Europeans are paying, then Europeans can destroy their accounts, or withhold payments.
One of the things YoUTube, Facebook, Spotify et all should realise is that if we pay not to see ads, and then stop paying, those ads that we barely tolerated before becoming paying customers will become intolerable if we stop paying. That’s when Facebook will lose the most users.
For a Mastodon instance you would pay from 5 euros per month for Linode for masto.host and up to 120 CHF per months for a Swiss option. Some Mastodon Instances cost around 25 Euros per month, from several providers. This means that if you’re one user Facebook is cheaper, and there are 2.6 billion active users per month. Mastodon and the Fediverse are much smaller, for now.
I disagree with Facebook’s policy that we should pay for Facebook, Instagram and potentially threads as three separate accounts with an additional fee for each account. If and when we need to pay a supplement for Instagram I will deselect that account, or maybe even delete it, rather than pay more. Instagram went from being one of my favourite apps before Facebook bought it, to a worthless pile of waste when Facebook destroyed the sense of community that had once been so pleasant.
From what I heard and saw Threads sounds awful, with very little control by users. It seems like a text based Instagram, and Instagram in its current form is worthless. Instagram is not worth an extra six CHF per month.
Paradoxically it is not the ads that bother me the most, but the influencer garbage. I don’t want to see the idealised lives of influencers. I want to see the real lives of the friends I follow on Instagram. It’s because of Influencer noise that I dumped Instagram.
My return to Facebook is due to one key reason. Twitter is no longer a community I want to be part of and although the Fediverse is filled with ideals, I am not ready to spend hundreds of days, weeks or months rebuilding a community on a platform where I am trolled and personally attacked for my views or opinions. I have already erased several accounts on instances.
If Glocals was still alive I would use that site to find people to do things with and if Meetup proposed free outdoor events I would join those. In the end Facebook offers a local community with topics I am interested in. As absurd as it feels to return to Facebook, it is the least worse option, for now.
Blogging and Digital Minimalism are related. Blogging is about finding a topic and focusing on it for an extended period of time. Social media has shifted from being a conversation between individuals to one where personalities broadcast, and their audience is ignored.
When I saw an article, read a book, or had a thought I would tweet or write one or two sentences and post it to Facebook or Google Plus. When social media was about private conversations between individuals, and when no one was making profits of billions from our habits it made sense. Today using social media is about wasting our time, while others benefit, without benefiting ourselves.
I started to read Digital Minimalism. He and others argue that our digital habits are about addiction rather than about feeling that we are connected with others. In the age of the car and the commuter, it makes sense for us to use digital devices to connect with others. Neither Facebook and Instagram nor Twitter have this at their core anymore.
Social media was a distraction from working on projects because it was a means by which to connect with others. Now that this is no longer the case we can revert to blogging and other projects.
Recently someone joked that no one reads blogs anymore. The value of a blog post is not derived from whether someone reads it, likes it or shares it. The value of the blog post is in taking half an hour to two hours to focus on a specific topic. It is an investment.
Focus: By writing a blog post you go from skimming through dozens of tweets a minute to thinking about a single topic for minutes or even hours. You go from skimming to thinking. Some journaling apps ask if you want to count the time you spend writing, as mindfulness minutes, I.E. meditation.
Writing: Writing for half an hour to two hours every day trains you to come to a blank page and fill it. You need to be creative or inspired. Shifting from copying a link, writing a sentence or two for Facebook or Twitter, and then sharing it is easy. You can repeat it countless times an hour. Writing a blog post, especially three hundred or more words is a challenge. That’s why it has value. Blogging is a skill. Through daily practice, you improve both your confidence and your ability to generate written content.
Editing: The more I write, the more time I have to think about form and style. When I run out of inspiration I go back over the previous paragraph and I re-work sentences and phrases, tightening them up and making them clearer. As writing becomes easier, so more time and attention is devoted to quality control. The result is a higher quality of content.
Ambition: Spending time on social media is passive. You read and comment on the work of others in short bursts. Blogging requires people to have the focus and self-confidence to write, edit, and then share long-form content. On numerous occasions, I have written blog posts and never shared them. This is either because I ran out of inspiration halfway through or because it was not positive enough.
Consistency: Nanowrimo and other projects teach you to be consistent for a week, a month or an extended period of time. Blogging fulfills the same role. It’s about having the discipline to sit and focus on a regular basis and write. It’s about training yourself to think about what you’re going to write tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. It’s about developing the habit of inspiration.
Blogging, for me, is a way of reaching the goal of Digital Minimalism. By writing a blog post and focusing for an hour or two, I produce a tangible product. By taking a picture during a hike, bike ride or other activity and writing a blog post I am investing my time. If I had allocated the same amount of time to social media I would have nothing to show for it.
Having said this Digital Minimalism is a concept I am not familiar with so expect a different perspective shortly.
Instagram is still a healthy social network. It still finds an engaged group of users who want to share their adventures, meals, friendships and more with other users. Some of them love sharing selfies and others share beautiful landscapes. This keeps the network vibrant and young.
Twitter on the other hand has neutralised peoples’ passion and engagement with the site. They wanted to become google reader, they wanted mass following of key accounts, they wanted to neutralise the social, conversational aspect and they have succeeded in their goal so effectively that now an IFTTT rule reduces the need to visit twitter.
When you share your instagram photos as native twitter photos you are hiding that you are disengaged from Twitter. By hiding this disengagement from the social network you are hiding that you may not respond to replies, mentions etc. By not responding to those interactions you are negating the purpose of your presence on the social network.
When you fail to interact directly with websites such as Twitter you perpetuate the notion that twitter is a place where bots interact with bots because humans are no longer present. When humans are gone, when interactions between users no longer take place then what remains of the “social network”?
Two hundred and ninety six thousand people have added this recipe to their IFTTT accounts. A quarter of a million people have chosen to spend time on Instagram rather than twitter. For this reason it makes sense to share pictures via Instagram. We will see your instagram account and we can start following it. In so doing we spend our time more effectively. Instagram still has a future. If you post to the networks that you want to use there is a good opportunity that others will want the same. Lets cut out twitter. 😉