ReaderWriterVille

Blog in progress

Tag: social media

November 6, 2022

Burning down the house

It’s strange to watch a platform with worldwide reach and influence visibly decay with a speed unmatched since MySpace flamed out, but I guess Move Fast and Break Things is one of the perks of being a narcissistic billionaire. We’ve seen these Twitter out-migrations a few times over the years, and there are any number of aspirants which have attempted to replace it. I still get weekly updates from WT Social even though I’ve never used it. I don’t post anywhere anymore, for the reasons I discussed here a few years ago. Except for Mastodon. I don’t go there often (before this week I hadn’t posted in a year), but I’ve returned to it on the rare occasions I’ve felt the need to say something online. Mostly, though, I don’t. I read Reddit and a few other message boards, and I have a private Twitter account where I follow no one but have a list of about 50 people and read that. I’ve found that limiting my active participation to the offline world has been good for many aspects of my health.

But I do like having windows into the online world, so when it started to look like Twitter was melting down in record time (just over a week! it’s been barely ten days!), I went back to Mastodon to see what the influx looked like this time. And boy howdy, it’s different from the 2017, 2019, 2021 waves. For one thing, there are a ton of journalists and even more academics. There are people who have acquired thousands of followers in a couple of days, which is like having ten times that many (at least) on Twitter. For a second thing, people aren’t just showing up and looking around. They’re hitting the ground running in terms of posts (so many posts and boosts and favoriting by some of the really active people) and they’re loudly asking why they can’t have their preferred Twitter features. It’s noisy and a bit disconcerting for those of us who like Mastodon for its non-Twitter aspects, especially the pace and the type of engagement.

Read the rest of this entry »
14 Comments
March 26, 2022

Through Day 80 in the100 Day Dress Challenge

Hi everyone! It’s been a few. I thought I’d return to the blog-living with a post on the dress challenge I wrote about in January. This is a challenge by the clothing company Wool&. You wear one of their merino wool dresses for 100 straight days (about 8 hours per day), take a photo each day, and if you make it to Day 100 and send them the photo proof, they’ll give you a $100 credit to use in their store. I started the challenge on January 5 and finished Day 80 yesterday. At this point I’m fairly certain I’ll make it to Day 100 and, more importantly, I should be able to remember to take photos on the remaining days. That’s been the biggest challenge so far.

This is obviously a promotional effort by Wool&, and there are apparently advertisements all over Instagram and Facebook. The challenge idea began in 2012 when the founder of the parent company, Wool + Prince, wore one of his men’s shirts for 100 days. When they first created the women’s version they offered 13 women a free dress if their wore one of their dresses for 100 days. Thousands of completed challenges later the compensation is $100, which doesn’t buy you a whole dress but gets you almost 75 percent of the way there (and you can use it for other things as well). Equally obviously, this is not something most people do for the money. $1/day is not going to keep anyone in the same dress for over three months, not if they could afford to buy the dress in the first place. But a surprising number of women have completed the challenge.

I wrote before about my motivations in starting. It was the beginning of the year, I wanted to do something to change up my wardrobe decision-making, and while I like dresses, I’ve been wearing trousers far more than skirts, let alone dresses. I’m not on social media and I use an ad blocker, so it wasn’t the siren song of ads or conversations. No, I went looking to do this to myself.

Unlike many of the women who participate, I didn’t join the very active Facebook group or hashtag my daily wears on Instagram. I didn’t even blog the experience here after my initial post. I told about three people I was doing it (apart from you, my faithful readers). I did read a LOT of posts by women doing the challenge, and I scrolled the Facebook and Twitter hashtags (Instagram locks you out if you’re not logged in). I picked up some ideas about how to vary the look. This proved harder to do when I was in California, because I hadn’t brought many clothes with me. But I wasn’t going many places and my meetings were all on Zoom, so I just put the dress on every day and added layers as the weather required.

Read the rest of this entry »
13 Comments
April 16, 2021

Congratulations Natalie!

INatalie Luhrs, AKA @Eilatan on Twitter, was nominated for a 2021 Hugo award for Best Related Work. She was recognized for her angry, passionate, wonderful post about last year’s Hugo awards.

There are people who are not happy about this. As is their right. (I’m not linking, you can find it pretty easily if you really want to read the thoughts of people who Know Best How To Honor Their Precious Award.)

I am very happy for Natalie and for the recognition of this particular work. I read the post when she wrote it and thought it was great. I’m not a Hugo voter but I’m glad that there were plenty of eligible voters who saw its value and put it on the board.

And for what it’s worth (not much), I read the first four Song of Ice & Fire books and thought they were wow!great! to good! to fine? to meh in sequential order. We watched the first episode of the HBO series, found it creepy and un-selfaware in its celebration of rapeyness, and didn’t continue.

But the important part of of this post is: Congratulations to Natalie!!! You go, girl.

4 Comments
August 14, 2019

ReaderWriterLinks: How To Read a Book edition

One of the things I’ve noticed about online media, both legacy and online-origin, is that a particular story idea will spread across several sites in a short time. Sometimes it’s generated by a research paper, like this one about how the TV you watch affects your political leanings. Or at least researchers found that what Italians watched when Berlusconi both headed up RAI and was a political leader affected their political attitudes. I could write a whole post on how one study does not a general theorem make, but that’s for another day; you can understand why this one went viral; it’s catnip for mediasplainers.

Today I have links from two major and historically respected newspapers which are designed to help people read books again. As you may have noticed, book coverage has changed to being about book culture rather than book reviews. I wrote about this a while back. And book culture is mostly about social media these days. Here’s the Guardian on how to love reading again. Presumably this is aimed at people who used to love reading but now find themselves not reading much, as opposed to people who were scarred by required reading in school and are just fine with not reading for pleasure, thankyouverymuch:

1. Follow book accounts on social media
If you’ve been away from reading for a while, it can be hard to know where to start. It can also be really tough to go from living your life online to building a separate one. By following Instagram accounts that regularly post about books, you’ll get ideas: try Book of the Month, Books on the Subway and Strand Bookstore for beautifully shot recommendations.
2. Read what you want to
If you haven’t read in a while, it can be tempting to set yourself lofty goals. For many of us that’s unrealistic, so instead: are there particular topics you’d love to read a non-fiction book about? Is there an author you’ve found easy to read before who has other books? Is there a favourite you can reread? When I’m finding it tough, I often punish myself by trying to slog through something hard before I let myself enjoy something that’s 200 pages and a laugh. But it’s enjoying the 200-pager that gets me in the swing of things, and makes it easier to concentrate on something tougher.
3. Join a library
Libraries are dying, and it’s partly because a lot of people don’t seem to consider them an option. But if finances are holding you back and you can trek to a library, it’s worth it. You can get recommendations, read for free and give up on books you can’t get into. Many have book clubs, too. For readers in the UK, you can find your nearest library here.

There are three more suggestions, and as the comments BTL (below the line) point out repeatedly, several of these involved using social media to get over your social media distractions. Yeah, that works well. But then this is someone who thinks libraries are dying because people don’t go to them, rather than because they are being starved of money. But I guess if the idea is to make reading trendy, pointing to social media is the way to go.

Read the rest of this entry »
3 Comments
August 5, 2019

Weeknote 16

It was an uneventful week, with very little out-and-about-ness. I minimized movement to give my knee time to recover (tendons and inflammation cannot be exercised/powered through) and it’s the dog days work-wise, so I read and did house stuff, mostly.

WORK

My coauthor and I wrapped up the first draft of our conference paper, so yay for us. It’s a very good paper, at least I think it is, and I can say this because I feel as if my coauthor did most of the work. He’s presenting it as a poster at the conference and I don’t have much left to do.

This week I get to nudge my committees and colleagues to the next stage of our tasks. So email! As I write these weekly notes, I realize how much time I spent either writing email, responding to email, or thinking about which emails I have to deal with and in what capacity. I guess it’s just the 21stC equivalent of memos, but somehow it seems more endless.

I should probably start thinking about what I want to change up in my classes this semester. I’m doing an overload this fall (don’t ask) and for scheduling and other reasons I have three, which I’ve only done one other time. It’s doable as long as I’m very organized (hahahaha) but it’s tiring. One of them is on immigration, which went really well last year but with everything going on I probably need to think about how I’m going to approach it.

READING/WATCHING/LISTENING

I finished up Lost Children Archive, my fourth Booker longlist read, and I need to write the review. The first half was a slog and I can’t say I really enjoyed it, although it was interesting and I think I could see what the author was trying to do. The second half was much better and very powerful. The book as a whole made me think a lot about where my limits are to reading autofiction: what kind, what works and what doesn’t, etc. I’m now reading the next two more or less together: Ducks, Newburyport and An Orchestra of Minorities. The latter is from the library and I need to get it read before I have to return it. It’s quite compelling and I’m finding it hard to put down even though the style is more ornate than I usually go for. Ducks is hypnotic, at least I’ve fallen into the rhythm quite easily. I don’t know how it will feel for 1000 pages, but so far I’m enjoying it a lot. It’s really accomplished.

We watched the next Maigret and Foyle’s War episodes, both of which were about attitudes toward immigrants. They hit a bit close to home and I wouldn’t say they were entirely enjoyable, although they were excellently done. I’m just so worn out and my ability to cope with endless, avoidable tragedy is at a low. The Jackson Brodie installment we watched, which was merely about routine corruption and murder, seemed almost mundane in comparison, and how sad is that?

Read the rest of this entry »
4 Comments