I’ve spent the last four years or so in what feels like a constant state of alert. Social media readiness.
Four years of living within a calamity turducken, one inside of another inside of another, dramatically changed my use of the internet, especially social media.
Now that Trump is out of office, it feels like there’s enough oxygen in my life to disarm and rethink how I’m using all of this stuff.
It feels like returning from war and trying to reenter civilian life.
Except that the way we lived and used social media before is … well … if it’s not gone, I’m not even sure what it was.
What was the Internet about before 2016?
Some of the voices that I valued from before all of this are now gone. Gabe from Macdrifter left Twitter and if he hasn’t stopped blogging, his frequency can best be described as “not completely nothing.”
John Roderick stepped in a huge pile of it on Twitter and then deleted his account in a panic. He’s podcasting again, thankfully.
Others have gone full speed political and abandoned the topics that made them interesting. I can understand that completely, not because my posts are interesting, but because politics absorbed a huge amount of my consumption and creation energy.
I’d imagine that media organizations and news rooms are going to go through some of the same adjustment. I’d imagine that they became structurally different because of the speed and insanity of the news cycle from the past four years.
In any case, I need to do a better job of making sure that I’m getting value out of all of this technology. Using it to build something or make something … continuing to grow and learn and all of that utopian functionality that is there if you know where to look and can keep yourself from succumbing to the Dark Side.
Anyways…