Recently my Social Media Life has become dormant. I do visit Facebook every so often but I ignore Instagram, barely touch Mastodon or the fediverse, and in general have stopped looking at social media for a social life. It’s not that my life offline has become vibrant. It’s that online is empty of meaningful engagement, especially in winter.
From the nineties right up to around 2018 or so social media was a place to meet and be social. It’s during the pandemic that social media seemed to die. I think that social media relies on meeting people in the physical world to have value. People on the social web use it when they’re on the toilet, or waiting for something else to happen. They’re just filling small gaps in their schedule.
Plenty of Potential Storage
The other reason is more positive. I have terabytes of storage spread across twenty two drives, or more and I am re-organising everything in order to see how much space I have free. I have at least twenty terabytes of data storage. I might have as much as fourty two terabytes of storage but due to file duplications I don’t have much space that is free.
Required for Video Projects
That’s frustrating, especially if you want to take video and can generate up to 64 gigabytes of data at a time. 64 gigabytes, because my Sxs cards have that amount of storage. The drone could have up to 512 gigabytes of storage if I put the right SD card into the camera.
Freeing Cloud Space
I can’t delete data from cloud storage solutions because I haven’t consolidated all of my photo and video files from iCloud, Flickr, Google Photos and one or two other services. If all of my files are organised chronologically then I can migrate from cloud storage solutions without worrying about losing images that might have been backed up only to iCloud, or Google Photos, or another solution.
By consolidating the data offline, I can manage data in the cloud with ease.
Shrodinger’s Storage Cat
For data to be safe you need to have two local copies, and one offsite backup. If you have a dozen, or two dozen drives then that data is like shrodinger’s cat. You don’t know whether it’s backed up (living) or a single copy (dead). Delete the wrong file and you might end up losing a few days, or a few months of data. By having a centralised main storage your small satellite drives become working drives. You use them while you’re working on a project, and once the project is over you move it to the main storage solution and either wipe and reuse that drive, or keep it as a backup. Shrodinger’s cat has left the storage device.
Looking Forward
Years ago I bought an eight terabyte drive because I planned to consolidate my personal video and photo files but I never got around to it. This morning I finished moving the junk I had on that drive to other drives and I have now started to backup the video and photo data that I had temporarily kept on a five terabyte drive. I realised that I have more data than would fit on a five terabyte drive, but it also failed to mount at least once.
For years I had the same data on five to six drives but in my move towards centralising, and then backing up my data I made myself unsafe. I was left with just one copy of data. Now that I am backing up the four terabytes of data I have from the five terabyte drive to the 8 terabyte drive I have a little margin of safety.
Consolidation
When moving files from the 5tb drive to the 8tb drive the process is simple. Move the video folde to the video folder, photo to photo, and documents to documents. It’s when I start moving the secondary drives to the main drive to consolidate my photos and videos that the value is generated because this is when I detect duplicate folders, videos and photos. This is when the value comes in.
Moving four terabytes of data takes hours, but once that data is moved, and as I consolidate data from six or seven other drives I will copy only the files that do not exist on the main volume. I will then move the files that I have checked into a zz-backed-up folder.
Low Value
When I was trying to free space on drives I deleted the files from the drive as soon as they were copied over. Now I am moving them to zz-backed-up as a scruffy backup. The aim is to be able to recover files if the 8tb volume fails, but these are a stop gap. The next step is to backup the 8 tb volume.
And Finally
Nothing is backed up until you have at least two copies locally, and a third off-site copy. The next step is to copy the files from an older volume to a newer volume. Old drives fail, so having files on older volumes is a risk. When I finish consolidating files to the eight terabyte volume I will then duplicate it to a newer 8TB volume.
As a side project, once I have two or more drives that are free of data I could experiment with setting up a raid system.
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You raise some very valid points here Richard and on the whole I agree with you.
I've recently gone through a Twitter cleansing process, dropping off a whole gang of folk, who although are well know in the Twitter stakes, were not adding any real value to my stream.
I am now hitting a much higher percentage of folk whom I've conversed with and therefore, most likely, shared some common ground.
These though, are not always people I'd go into a project with, although they may be people I'd share similar or project ideas with. In turn the value Twitter is offering me is increasing with each of these cleansing processes.
That said, Twitter is a free tool that people are invited to with as they wish. Should people want to follow a hundred celebrity twitters to find out when they are getting out of the shower or stuck in a lift, then they are free to do so. This doesn't necessarily make them idiots.
I also agree blogs are were the real thought goes in, its a slower more cerebral process blogging. Those that thought Twitter was the end of blogging were just jumping on a popularist bandwagon, there is plenty of space for both of them in the market.
Twitter can be used for many things and that's one of the benefits of the interface that should be celebrated. You choose what enters your feed, you also choose what to do with that information.
It's good to see people whom might otherwise never have spoken sharing and pooling similar ideas on a global instantaneous platform.
Thanks for the post!
Writing about twitter is a good way by which to explore the site in more depth, as well as how people use it. Of course people are free to use it as they please. After all that's what I've been doing for months now.
The point is simply that I like to think of it as a conversational, dynamic tool so I will use it as such, and I want people to see the reasons why simply following a lot of people may not be the best use twitter has to offer. I'm still part of the community after all all.
What I like about blogs and personalities is that you don't expect them to interact as much. You know that they know about a topic and they will share their knowledge. As a result of this whether they answer to the comments doesn't matter, That's the nature of the medium.
It goes back to McLuhan and his hot and cold media, which ones do we get a lot of information from and which ones are more passive, more conversational. If people do nothing but post to twitter, without people aknowledging anything then why drop into the site.
Being passive on twitter means that eventually people would stop using the site though.
Hi Richard.
Good thoughts here. Everyone has their own unique way of using Twitter, which I have heard called “shaping your Twitter stream.” I agree, following 1000s of people is pretty much useless on Twitter, but being followed by 1000s without having to resort to “gaming” may just be a result of being interesting and informative.
That is the purpose of my article. To let people know of another way they can get value from Twitter. I am not proposing people follow only the Internet Celebs. I don't follow all of them. I don't even think I follow many of the top ten on Twitter (based on followers) because of the reasons you mention above (no engagement, not interesting on Twitter).
The article outlines my personal list of people that I follow who I get a ton of value from – the equivalent of a higher education regardless of whether I engage them or converse with them or not.
Anyway thanks for engaging me here on your blog about my post. Always interested in other people's opinions, especially when they are the opposite of mine.
I don't disagree with following those people. after all I followed myself for weeks or even months before finding I had little or nothing more to gain. After all to some extent timezones, as much as anything else affect how interesting it is to follow certain people.
Recently using twhirl I noticed that I was getting close to ten thousand tweets a day. That's a lot of information to sort through. The problem was that out of those thousands of tweets hardly ever resulted in personal engagement with certain individuals devaluing the practice to some extent.
I do enjoy exploring people's blog posts at the same time. I enjoy that I now spend more time reading blog posts and commenting, seeing a broader range of opinions in the process.
I'm glad that you're still following me, so thanks for that.
I might beg to differ with how you say what you do, but then again, it's your blog. My point is that everyone uses the tools differently. Some folks follow those other people because of all the information they provide. Not everyone wants Twitter to be a deeply personal, one-to-one experience.
That YOU want it to be says a lot about you, and I'm glad you're using the tool that way. But telling other people that they're an idiot use it differently than you?
I look forward to talking with you more some time.
I know that not everyone wants twitter to be personal, and that's part of what frustrates me at the moment. I feel that social networks are at their strongest when people have a personal connection with those they are followed by and who they follow.
I'm listening to everyone, learning about their point of view. Earlier today one person who was not following that many, and not followed by that many said that he found tweetdeck to be interesting because he could join into a greater diversity of conversations. In that context I see the value of tweetdeck. I'm also happy for his comments that made me re-think that position.
There are a number of services that aggregate content without people actively going through that data and it's a shame. Jaiku didn't grow as much as it could because of that problem. That's just one example of many of course.
Those who are new to the social media should not forget that it's about conversation, that they shouldn't simply promote their product but instead take advantage to converse with their followers.
Marketing and public relations have always wanted to know what people were thinking. Now that they can maybe they should spend more time listening, asking questions and digesting those responses.
It's a complex issue and I love studying how the social media are evolving. I'd love to go into more detail but this is already a long comment.
Be Still my heart -when did you get appointed as the Seal Of Approval Maven on micro-blogging applications-and how people should use them- reading your post is like taking swimming lesson's from a drowning man, HEH
I love twitter and I've given a lot of time to the site as a user. I've met some interesting people and had some interesting conversations. If I can keep it like that then I'm happy.
Those who want to use twitter differently are free to do so. I simply won't follow their twitter activity because I don't enjoy it as much.
I have been testing the theory and so far I've been getting far better results. I send no more messages to those that don't answer because I don't follow them. I see more of the tweets by people who enjoy conversing and as a result I can have great conversations on twitter.
The drawback is that I probably ended up flooding a few timelines recently. Not too worried though. It doesn't hapen all the time.
300 people is a big investment of time when you're reading every tweet. At one point I was following over a thousand. I noticed on a few days that it meant receiving over 10,000 tweets a day. Now I only get two to three thousand I think. Much easier to manage 🙂