I have a difficult relationship with social media. On the one hand it is a channel for announcing when I have a book coming out – the reason I went back to Facebook after some years away – on the other hand it is a timesink of increasingly limited value. Over the past few years I have had presences on several platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Twitter, Blue Sky and Mastodon, and possibly others I’ve forgotten.
This week I deactivated my TikTok and Twitter accounts. Threads was ditched some time ago; I rarely look at Mastodon. So only Blue Sky, Instagram and Facebook remain. Also, because I use Substack for occasional notes about Diabetes, I have Substack Notes which is similar to social media in some respects but primarily a way of finding long-form posts on that platform.
One of the things I’ve been pondering this week (since my illness last weekend) is the continuing utility of my social media accounts. My baseline is that I want at least some for marketing purposes, but my use cases otherwise are quite limited. As well as family connectivity, Facebook is pretty good for genealogy. I’m not sure why I keep Instagram going. Bluesky is fine as a replacement for Twitter, but I only check in every so often, with some interest but not much enthusiasm although it is a good source of current historical thinking given the number of historians and medievalists I follow there.
I’m not going anywhere with this except thinking out loud. In essence, were it not for marketing needs, would I withdraw from social media entirely? The answer is probably ‘no,’ but working out why that is the case will guide my use of various platforms as time goes by.
As of this morning, I have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Instagram and Bluesky as well as an account on TikTok that I rarely, if ever, look at, and also a Substack presence for diabetes-related stuff. The sudden proliferation (Mastodon, Threads and Bluesky particularly) is to try to fit out a lifeboat for when Twitter goes under and also to open channels to promote my books. I may be doing the socials wrong, but I haven’t noticed a particular upswing in sales as a result of engagement on social media – maybe one or two copies at best – so it’s a questionable strategy.
Impressions:
Facebook is great for family photos. Twitter is great for focused lists. Mastodon is for people who find accountancy a bit racy and would probably ban me from their server for saying so. Substack Notes is full of writers trying to turn a coin or two, mostly from each other. Threads is a bit of a nothing. Bluesky is potentially more interesting – I like the interface – but is still invitation only and thus busy creating and reinforcing bubbles and echo chambers. All of the new sites currently skew towards always-online Americans who post bad takes about politics and culture wars.
I stick with Twitter for the most part, because of the ability to create and use lists for focused analysis and breaking news. For me, the first of the alternatives that attracts a critical mass of users and lets me put together lists of users that I don’t also have to ‘follow’ will likely be my new home.
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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds finished on a cliffhanger made more dramatic by the writers and actors strikes that delay the resolution by another year. Subspace Rhapsody is still under my skin, and my liking of it has been amplified by the reaction of the fanboys whose world view has been challenged. In other viewing:
Foundation is back for season 2 and is going nowhere. Invasion is also back for season 2. It was slow and methodical in its storytelling in season 1 by design and I liked it a lot. S2 has had a promising start. Ahsoka is with us and … I’m reserving judgement. I was surprised by how slow the pacing was, and not in a good way. It helps if you’ve watched previous animated series by Dave Filoni, especially Star Wars: Rebels.
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I posted this on the socials a while ago but not here. This is a boost for the soul while writing and looking at book sales that can charitably be described as sluggish. Ethan comments that to express yourself you first have to know yourself. I’d caveat that by saying that expressing yourself in writing or the other arts is a way of getting to know yourself. The two are intertwined.
My last post was about opening an account on Mastodon and feeling generally well-disposed towards it. My opinion has shifted over the short time that I’ve been on there. My view now is that I prefer(ed) Twitter as it was pre-Musk to Mastodon as it is now. This post is an attempt to articulate how my thoughts have shifted, not least for my own benefit.
To help me, I invoke the spirit of Shania Twain.
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One of the more terrifying aspects of medieval and early-modern criminal law, certainly in Scotland, was a predilection towards burning the convicted. In large part this was drawn from biblical laws and punishments, and in most cases was related to crimes against natural law. The malefactor didn’t just have to be killed, they had to be thoroughly erased from existence because their very presence in creation was objectional to God. Indeed, in 1678, Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh wrote in his The Laws and Customs of Scotland in Matters Criminal that punishments for some particularly ‘atrocious’ crimes should be conducted in private or under the cover of darkness to avoid giving curious people any ideas.
I mention this because something of that same spirit prevails on Mastodon – the notion that some forms of wrong-think are so atrocious that they must be destroyed by fire, and hidden from the innocent eyes of decent users by de-platforming malefactors and defederation of servers/instances that bear the stain of their presence. I do not like that approach and reckon it will not survive contact with the larger world.
To misquote Shania,
I’ve known a few guys who think they’re pretty smart
But you’ve got your purity right down to an art
You think you’re all holy, you drive me up the wall
You’re all regular original know-it-alls
Oh-ooh-oh, you think you’re special
Oh-ooh-oh, you think you’re something else
OK, so you’re the thought police?
That don’t impress me much
People whose views differ from mine are voices I want to hear, or at least don’t mind hearing. And, anyway, other people’s right to hold opinions and their right to express them does not impose upon me any correlative obligation to listen. I block and mute on Twitter, but do that at my own initiative not at the whim of third parties who want to maintain ideological purity, I typically only block and mute on the basis of the way those views are expressed or when extended argument about topics gets tiresome.
To be clear, I’m not saying that there aren’t opinions out there that I find objectionable or that there aren’t bad actors telling lies for various ends, and I am not advocating a red in tooth and claw free-for-all approach to social interaction. But, notwithstanding recognition of the need for moderation and controls, I do not like being prohibited from seeing or hearing other people’s words and opinions because of someone else’s scruples, and that is the default position of Mastodon by design.
Much is made of a culture of kindness and tolerance on Mastodon, but when I’ve lifted the lino to see what’s underneath, I’ve seen some aggressively unpleasant attempts at forced moderation expressed in objectionable terms – not so much attempts to foster an ethos of kindness as the operation of levers to enforce silence while also expressing smug satisfaction about the superiority of the place. In that context, I am aware of the reported experiences of people of colour who have found the culture in the Fediverse to be unwelcoming at best and actively hostile at worst. The nature of Mastodon’s federated structure means it is difficult for me to see or experience that first-hand, but I have no reason to disbelieve those voices.
You’re all those guys who like to shine their ego
Wherever the zeitgeist goes there you are
I can’t believe you kiss your servers good night
Now, c’mon, baby, tell me? You must be jokin’, right?
Oh-ooh-oh, you think you’re something special
Oh-ooh-oh, you think you’re something else
OK, so you think that you’re refugees?
That don’t impress me much
I’ve made many good and genuine friends over the decades online on various list servers, forums, and platforms. As I said in the last post here,
Why bother? Well, it all comes down to two reasons: (i) at its best social media is genuinely social, fun and informative in exactly the same way as a night at the pub; (ii) out of sociability and engagement arises the potential to make people aware of my writing without spamming them.
I think Musk may well have done terminal damage to Twitter (see here for one reason why I think he has.) He emailed his remaining staff to say that he sees Twitter as ‘at heart a software and server business,’ which is about as complete a misunderstanding of what he bought as it’s possible to get, and that doesn’t bode well. For now, Twitter may or may not be on the tumbril rattling towards the scaffold, and Mastodon will do for some purposes – until something better comes along.
OK, so you’re Elon Musk?
That don’t impress me much …
You will be familiar with the idea that the difference between a frog and a bicycle is that a competent engineer can disassemble a bicycle and rebuild it – possibly improving it in the process. The attempt to do that with a frog leads to catastrophic collapse of the frog, Failure to observe that fundamental distinction between bicycles and frogs is a category error with significant consequences, not least for the frog.
That brings us to the elongated muskrat and Twitter. The muskrat appears to have fallen into that same category error and the jury is out on whether or not the platform is going to be launched into eternity (or close it’s eyes to subluminary objects, as the old broadside accounts of hangings had it) along with the frog. Complex systems under stress can collapse beyond the point of recovery very quickly, even if their central nervous systems leave them twitching for some time afterwards. Is this the case with Twitter? Quite possibly.
Anyway, like an awful lot of other people, I have also opened an account at Mastodon, just in case. If you are at all inclined to look for me, I am here: @cosmic_serf@mastadonapp.uk.
So far, Mastodon has been interesting, mostly in a positive way. The server(s) are currently struggling with latency and capacity issues because of the sheer number of people who have joined, but beyond that I have some concerns.
I’ve been around the internet long enough to remember when it wasn’t at all clear that Mosaic and Gopher would work. Many of the ideals that framed those early days fell by the wayside as the whole thing was commercialised and monetised. Where the ideals survive is in the open-source scene from which Mastodon emerged, and in the attitudes of old-timers like me. I would like Mastodon to succeed, but the idea that Mastodon is not like other sites because *waves hands in vague fashion* is wrong. It may have been true a fortnight ago, but it isn’t now because new users are importing learned behaviour from Twitter. When ideals meet humans, ideals always suffer.
As with any new place, there is a learning curve, and part of that is to control the timeline to see only what I want to see – or, more precisely, to not see what I don’t want to see. I figured out how to do that with Twitter and Facebook, but have still to do the work with Mastodon.
Why bother? Well, it all comes down to two reasons: (i) at its best social media is genuinely social, fun and informative in exactly the same way as a night at the pub; (ii) out of sociability and engagement arises the potential to make people aware of my writing without spamming them.
Although I moan here from time to time about Twitter, it has its uses, especially when there are significant events in progress. I first noticed this during the London Riots of 2011 when I found a Twitter list of journalists on the ground reporting live. Since then, I’ve maintained a list of journalists whose opinions and reporting I respect, moving individuals in or out of the list as time goes by. Over the past two and a half weeks I’ve been maintaining a list of commentators and analysts discussing the invasion of Ukraine, and I’ve found it to be a valuable way of keeping up with what’s going on without the relentlessness of 24-hour news on TV.
The preponderance of opinion there is that Russia is losing and losing badly. I rather hope that this is the case, but that’s why I’ve tried to build the list to be serious and sober analysts for the most part – to avoid confirmation bias. Still, I can’t help but keep my fingers crossed that they are correct: things can change rapidly with the advent of the unexpected. If anyone is interested, I’ve made the list public for the duration of the conflict; I’ll hide or delete it after that. The link is below, but please note that WordPress will, I think, show the current live feed over which I have no control, and I can’t find a way to disable it.
Something I have to comment on, and part of my reason for sticking with analysts, is the reaction to the sinking of the Moskva by Ukraine. This was treated with glee by many on social media, like they were gamers in front of their TV, controllers in hand, watching the points rack up in the corner of the screen. I understand why there was that reaction and the importance of the sinking as a symbolic act and blow to Russian prestige. But there was no glee here, no gotcha! moment. Why? Because Dad was Royal Navy (although he insisted all his days that the Fleet Air Arm wasn’t mere Royal Navy) from the latter part of WW2 into the late 1940s. He told me once that he was lucky to have a surname beginning with ‘B’ because he was sent to the Mediterranean while others further down the alphabet in his intake were shipped off to the Pacific only to drown when their transports were sunk. That makes it personal because his survival meant my existence. War does not only kill people, it erases future generations too.
The upshot is that, however important the sinking of the Moskva might be, I take no glee in the deaths of sailors at sea. In 2009, one of Dad’s old shipmates, Bill Entwhistle, explained it to me:
The Navy differs from other branches of the armed forces because they have to contend with the sea, one of the four elements and one which sustains them but can kill them in a moment. He was insistent too on the law of the sea – a man in the water is a man to be rescued irrespective of his nationality or allegiance in a conflict.
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One of the other pleasures of Twitter is random discoveries that bring joy. One of these came yesterday when a user called Tarotplane, a Captain Beefheart fan by the sound of it, posted a list of ten experimental Italian albums from the 1970s. Not to everyone’s taste, I daresay, but I fell deep into the rabbit hole last night.
a list of Italian cosmic and experimental albums of the 70’s. While not typical prog, space rock, or psych folk, there were quite a few albums that had similarities with all of these styles but were distinctly Italian. I hope you find a few that are new to you.
It’s an odd time to be writing blog posts, for those few of us who still do it. Maybe if I focused on cooking or writing or running or some single subject it would be different, but this has always been a place for random diary items and journaling, and I rarely edit past entries unless I spot particularly egregious typos. It’s an odd time because, while my daily life goes on largely unchanged, there is war on the edge of Europe and it remains uncertain what will happen there, except that more people will die.
In The Fourth Craw, one of the stories in Coyote in the Corner, I wrote:
In La Rossa’s, over cards and cold beers, the talk was all of the war and whether we liberators could be trusted. As always, the cry was to punish the guilty, but all over Europe it was the innocent who died – quickly, slowly, cleanly, appallingly. Modern warfare made sure the innocent were more efficiently targeted: a school here, a hospital there, evisceration everywhere; the accidents that always happen when you drop bombs on inhabited areas. It never matters which side you are on when the shrapnel comes your way, the gas slips over the back of your throat, the bread knife hacks your gizzard. And always it is the fault of the other side, never, ever, the fault of the side that pulled the trigger, no sir, sounds like sympathising to me, sir, please step this way while we ask you some questions—
Todays news and images from Bucha are horrible and distressing; they were also predictable because it is what invading armies do and have done throughout human history. All that’s left to a blogger, safe in a semi-detached house in the Edinburgh suburbs, is to type inarticulate noises of rage – which make as much sense, and have as much impact, as any finely crafted reporting in a newspaper or on TV.
Should I note the deer I saw on the hill behind our house yesterday while out for a walk? Or my enjoyment of a couple of TV shows I’ve watched, or the progress of my writing? Should I complain about energy prices or the increasingly empty shelves of my local Tesco? That would be as banal as the nonsense I’ve seen sluiced across Twitter – where people risk, and lose, their lives to send despatches from the frontline while useful idiots exercise their thumbs issuing lukewarm takes that expose their own ignorance.
What’s behind my mumbling and slurring of thought is a continuation of thoughts in other recent posts: something is happening in Ukraine of profound importance. This is not because it’s closer to home than other monstrosities and not some distant land far away of which we know nothing, it’s because it is a turning point, and one that has been coming for decades. Ukrainians are dying for a way of life that we take for granted. It brings us to an either/or situation where nuance is a dangerous luxury, as likely to betray as to bring comfort, and sitting on the fence will just see you impaled.
The events of today are occurring in a symbolic space, just as irrevocably as they are occurring physically in the fields and bomb shelters of Ukraine. Ukraine today is the arena of an ancient battle between good and evil, however grandiose that might sound; its outcome affects every one of us, not just Ukraine and Russia.
Evil is an old-fashioned concept. The postwar decades have taught us to see things automatically from the perspective of our opponent in order to establish understanding, compromise and dialogue. But sometimes there is no one to speak with — in the place of an interlocutor there is only impenetrable darkness, and it insists on its own outcome at any cost.
That isn’t the kind of language that sits easily with me outside of a fictional context, and my rational self seeks to unpick it and question it – and yet there is a truth in it. That is uncomfortable for a generation like my own, that grew up in the long shadow of WW2 but at least drew some comfort from it being behind us. That comfort is no longer available. There is discussion over on Twitter of whether the graphic images from Bucha should have been shared: my answer is yes. We cannot turn a blind eye in the name of decorum.
And yet all your blogger can do is type inconsequentialities onto a screen, unstuck in time, falling towards Tralfamadore, while outside the slaughterhouse the birds sing Poo-tee-weet.
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