Hypothes.is is an annotation service. I can’t remember who recommended I follow his annotations, but Chris Aldrich’s gleanings are worth following via RSS.
For example, I never would otherwise have come across this, from a Discord chat room, which got me thinking about roles within networks and communities.
I think this is the interplay where things get lost. There are very few theorizers, and tonnes of enactors. And everyone ends up thinking the enactors are theorizers, but they’re not. They’re developing specific methods without building up — and especially without critiquing — the underlying theory.
As I’m catching up with news from various sources and bookmarking articles to come back and share via Thought Shrapnel, I also come across interesting tools and resources.
Here are some of them that I thought were interesting enough to share.
ArchiveWeb.page is “the latest tool from Webrecorder to turn your browser into a full-featured interactive web archiving system!”
Bookfeed.io is “a simple tool that allows you to specify a list of authors, and generates an RSS feed with each author’s most recently released book.”
Loudreader is “the world’s only ebook reader that can open .azw3 [and] .mobi files in a browser!”
NES.css is “a NES style (8bit-like) CSS framework.” (also see Simple.css)
novelWriter is “a markdown-like text editor designed for writing novels and larger projects of many smaller plain text documents.”
Open Peeps is a hand-drawn illustration library. “You can use Open Peeps in product illustration, marketing imagery, comics, product states, user flows, personas, storyboarding, invitations for your quinceañera…or anything else not on this list.”
Pattern Generator provides you with a way to “create unique, seamless, royalty-free patterns”.
Same Energy is “a visual search engine. You can use it to find beautiful art, photography, decoration ideas, or anything else.”
Screenstab allows you to “cut down on time and effort by auto-generating appealing graphics for marketing materials, social media posts, illustrations & presentation slides.”
Quotation-as-title by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Image by Jessica Lee.
So said Albarran Cabrera, except I added a cheeky question mark.
I have a theory. Not a grand, unifying theory of everything, but a theory nonetheless. I reckon that, despite common wisdom attributing the decline of comments on blogs to social media, it’s at least also because of something else.
Here’s an obvious point: there’s more people online now than there were ten years ago. As a result, there’s more stuff being produced and shared and, because of that, there’s more to miss out on. This is known as the Fear Of Missing Out (or FOMO).
While I don’t think anyone realistically thinks it’s possible to keep up with everything produced online every day, I think people do have an expectation that they can keep up with what their online friends are doing and thinking. As the number of people we’re following in different places grows and grows, we don’t have much time to share meaningfully. Hence the rise of the retweet button.
Back in 2006, in the mists of internet time, Kathy Sierra wrote a great post entitled The myth of “keeping up”. Remember that this was before people were really using social networks such as Twitter. She talks about what we’re experiencing as ‘information anxiety’ and has some tips to combat it, which I think are still relevant:
Find the best aggregators
Get summaries
Cut the redundancy!
Unsubscribe to as many things as possible
Recognise that gossip and celebrity entertainment are black holes
Pick the categories you want for a balanced perspective, and include some from OUTSIDE your main field of interest
Be a LOT more realistic about what you’re likely to get to, and throw the rest out.
In any thing you need to learn, find a person who can tell you what is:
Need to know
Should know
Nice to know
Edge case, only if it applies to you specifically
Useless
The interesting thing is that, done well, social media can actually be a massive force for good. It used to be set up for that, coming on the back of RSS. Now, it’s set up to drag you into arguments about politics and the kind of “black holes” of gossip and celebrity entertainment that Kathy mentions.
One of the problems is that we have a cult of ‘busy’ which people mis-attribute to a Protestant work ethic instead of rapacious late-stage capitalism. I’ve recently finished 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary where he makes this startlingly obvious, but nevertheless profound point:
Because one’s bank account and one’s friendships can now be managed through identical machinic operations and gestures, there is a growing homogenization of what used to be entirely unrelated areas of experience.
Jonathan Crary
…and:
[S]ince no moment, place, or situation now exists in which one can not shop, consume, or exploit networked resources, there is a relentless incursion of the non-time of 24/7 into every aspect of social or personal life.
Jonathan Crary
In other words, you’re busy because of your smartphone, the apps you decide to install upon it, and the notifications that you then receive.
The solution to FOMO is to know who you are, what you care about, and the difference you’re trying to make in the world. As Gandhi famously said:
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Mahatma Gandhi
I’ve recently fallen into the trap of replying to work emails on my days off. It’s a slippery slope, as it sets up an expectation.
The same goes with social media, of course, except that it’s even more insidious, as an ‘action’ can just be liking or retweeting. It leads to slacktivism instead of making actual, meaningful change in the world.
People joke about life admin but one of those life admin tasks might be to write down (yes! with a pen and paper!) the things you’re trying to achieve with the ‘free’ apps that you’ve got installed. If you were being thorough, or teaching kids how to do this, perhaps you’d:
List all of the perceived benefits
List all of the perceived drawbacks
List all of the ways that the people making the free app can make money
Tim Ferriss recently reposted an interview he did with Seth Godin back in 2016 about how he (Seth) manages his life. It’s an object lesson in focus, and leading an intentional life without overly-quantifying it. I can’t help but think it’s all about focus. Oh, and he doesn’t use social media, other than auto-posting from his blog to Twitter.
For me, at least, because I spend so much time surrounded by technology, the decisions I make about tech are decisions I make about life. A couple of months ago I wrote a post entitled Change your launcher, change your life where I explained that even just changing how you access apps can make a material difference to your life.
So, to come full circle, the best place to be is actually where you are right now, not somewhere else. If you’re fully present in the situation (Tim Ferriss suggests taking three breaths), then ask yourself some hard questions about what success looks like for you, and perhaps whether what you say, what you think, and what you do are in harmony.
