Social Media — David Hughes

18 November 2022

RIP Twitter?

I took a break from Twitter when Musk took over and quickly laid off thousands of staff via email.

I didn’t think that even he could do so much damage so quickly.

I was one of the very early users of Twitter as it took off in the web design community.

I’ve made friends through Twitter that have become friends IRL.

Twitter was key to early success of Milton Keynes Geek Night, with our Twitter friends becoming a little black book of fabulous speakers.

I’ve watched as many of those friends have ebbed away from Twitter, some to other platforms and some away from social media completely.

It was a quieter place, but it was a place that still held a special place in my heart.

Which is why seeing it brought to its knees by Elon Musk has been difficult to watch.

Yes it’s just a website, but it’s more than that, it’s more than just the code and the pixels it’s a worldwide community I loved being part of.

I hope that if or when Musk finally breaks Twitter somebody better buys that code and brings back the community.

20 January 2021

Owning My Own Content

Last weekend I was about to post some photos from a frosty forest walk onto Instagram and paused as I was pondering the best tags to add to ‘drive engagement’.

I remembered a commitment I’d made to myself over Christmas – to consume mindfully, to create more and to own the content I create. I stopped uploading the pictures and removed Instagram from my phone once again.

I’ve often spoken about missing the heyday of personal blogs, before social media became peoples primary outlet online. I’ve been meaning to dust of this blog for months and was genuinely surprised to see my last post was published 9 months ago.

I’ve been inspired to do so but what feels like a mini blogging renaissance amongst my friends with veritable flood of posts from Al, Andrew and Christian.

I’m looking forward to once again sharing thoughts, photos and ‘found things’ via my personal site. Good to see you again.

19 June 2019

35 Years Of Progress?

Ian Bogost’s Atlantic article I Wrote This on a 30-Year-Old Computer was written entirely on an 30 year old Macintosh SE and makes for a fascinating trip down memory lane and back to the future.

There’s much to think about in the article, but one line really stood out to me:

Computing was an accompaniment to life, rather than the sieve through which all ideas and activities must filter.

“The sieve through which all ideas and activities must filter” what a phrase and what a thought.

Within my online ‘bubble’ there seems to be a growing movement away from social media and being ‘always on’ and towards Digital Minimalism – a phrase coined by Cal Newport in his latest book.

I wonder if we’ve made as much progress as we think we have over the last 35 years, or have we become shackled and beholden to the devices and services we’ve created?

19 December 2016

Distraction Sickness – Part Two

Earlier this year I took my daughter to the National Gallery in London, which houses one the most amazing collections of pre-Twentieth Century art in the world.

Surrounded by incredible art from Van Gogh, Turner, Monet, Matisse, Cezanne, Vermeer to name just a few favourites an inexplicable number of visitors seemed more intent on the virtual world of their smartphones…

But there was an even more peculiar behaviour that my daughter and I christened Pokéart.

Time and again we’d see a visitor walk up to a work of art, take a picture on their phone and walk off; spending no time looking at the painting with their own eyes.

I didn’t ‘get’ Van Gogh until I saw his paintings at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The contours, ridges, swirls and sheer depth in the paint applied by Van Gogh has to be seen to be truly appreciated. Seeing them in two dimensions on a print or a screen does not do them justice, and yet here were dozens of people happy to catch great works of art like Pokémon.

Pokéart – gotta catch em all.

27 September 2016

Distraction Sickness

Just look around you — at the people crouched over their phones as they walk the streets, or drive their cars, or walk their dogs, or play with their children. Observe yourself in line for coffee, or in a quick work break, or driving, or even just going to the bathroom. Visit an airport and see the sea of craned necks and dead eyes. We have gone from looking up and around to constantly looking down.

– Andrew Sullivan – My Distraction Sickness and Yours

9 February 2016

Only People Were Ever Meaningful

The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.

I’m reading You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier, this passage really resonated with me.