Social Media
- Update, Nov. 24, 2014: I've decided to close Clio and Me and Language for You after all, though I will gradually migrate some of that material over here. ↩
Ukrainian Media at War
In the past, I rarely watched YouTube, but the bird site’s corruption has seen me on YouTube much more often, as I search for content about Ukraine. Recently I found a good Ukrainian-made series about how Ukrainians in various kinds of media have adapted to Russia’s full-scale invasion. There are 10 episodes, not counting a 3-minute trailer. All but the last are about 15 minutes long, and the final one is 25 minutes. (I’ve seen half of them so far.) The series is largely in Ukrainian with English subtitles, and partly in English with Ukrainian subtitles, depending on who is speaking. The titles on YouTube are in Ukrainian, but there’s a playlist that has them all in the correct order. Besides, you don’t need to know the Cyrillic alphabet to read the episode numbers (єпізод 1, 2, 3 …) of “Media at War” (Медіа на війні) and to watch Ukrainians speak for themselves.
Ongoing Saga
It’s so hard to look away from Musk’s wrecking ball when I go to Twitter for voices on Ukraine. Also hard not to comment on other people’s posts. Now the would-be dictator of the bird site is banning and unbanning journalists, depending on his mood and random Twitter polls. He’s also banning links to all kinds of outside networks, even Linktree. He might change his mind about some sites by playing the gracious leader who puts things to a plebiscite, but who needs that? More and more diehards are leaving. I’d like to see regulators take an aggressive look at what he’s doing. But I’d also like to see media outlets, government offices, and other big institutions set up their own Mastodon servers to render the Big Twit’s actions moot.
Evening update: Poof! Just like that, the latest stupid policies have vanished from the bird site’s support pages, while Musk is conducting a poll about whether he should hire a different CEO in place of himself. Of course, none or all of these things could be true by morning.
Bye Bye Birdie
Mastodon
Writing is Thinking
Fifteen years ago, I wrote a short post encouraging students to write for themselves on a regular basis.
Writing is hard work for almost everyone, no matter how talented or inspired. Writing is thinking. Good writers do not usually have finished ideas that they then type out. The process of writing and revision is an act of thinking and discovery. . . .
A couple days ago, a tweet by a disaster historian came across my timeline that summed things up perfectly.
Open Access Article on 'History of Knowledge' Blog
A short article I wrote with Kerstin von der Krone about History of Knowledge, the first blog in the German Historical Institute Washington’s scholarly publishing program, is now open access. See “Blogging Histories of Knowledge in Washington, DC," in “Digital History,” ed. Simone Lässig, special issue, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 47, no. 1 (2021): 163–74.
Information, Sociability, Reality Check
I've been off RSS readers for a while, in part because of Google's exit from the game, but also because of information overload. Thinking about using it again and revisiting some old stomping grounds in the blogosphere, I found Dan Cohen's relevant comments on Ann Blair's Too Much to Know. Seems I am in good company with my occasional ignoring of information—ignoring that I prefer to think won't lead to, might even prevent, ignorance.
I treat Twitter rather cavalierly too, as if it were a place to hang out, learn stuff, share things, and then leave—sometimes for longer spells. If I view all these information inputs in social terms, this is a perfectly rational way to engage with the Twittersphere. If I worried about missing some bit of news, some fascinating article or weird event, I would never get anything done and my mind would become a still murkier mess. Besides, meaningful ideas and conversations tend to have longer lifespans, and they make themselves felt in other contexts.
Dan's piece, indeed his whole blog, reminds me of another thing. Much ostensibly older writing on the web has value, and sometimes we should take a moment to read bits of it instead of gulping down and spewing forth a remixed version of the latest clever insight or rant. (I'm talking about myself here, bigly, uh, big league.)
Social Media Behavior
If we pass around quotes on images without even a hint of the quotes’ origins, aren’t we part of the problem?
The History of Knowledge and Contemporary Discourse on Science
The polarizing contemporary debate on science in the United States could be extraordinarily interesting for historians of knowledge, if it were occurring in the past. Still, if we could divert our attention from the news for a moment, we might find it offers some food for thought.
In the midst of the current conversation, which is experiencing renewed fervor under the new administration, the Twitterverse is exploding with talk of "truthiness," "alternative facts," "fact-based journalism," "fake news," and "lies." This rhetoric encompasses not just climate science but also everyday policy-making and "s/he said" – "s/he said" arguments. It is easy to get caught up in this conversation, whose ideological and epistemological battle lines seem so clearly drawn, but one thing gets lost—most of the time, anyway.
Another Fresh Start
For a historian, I seem to have a rather cavalier attitude towards preserving my own past on the web. This site was once a personal blog in which I politicized, philosophized, and mused about the economic crisis that began hurting people some five years ago; about the presidential race that led to a wonderful, if cold inauguration day here in Washington, DC in 2008; and, less frequently, about aspects out of my everyday life, past and present. I've saved that stuff for my own records, but I don't know what purpose it serves on the web. I blog to make sense of things or tell stories or both, but I don't do so with the sensibilities of a diarist or archivist.
For the same reason, there are also a few thousand tweets missing from the early days of my twitter account—though I understand that the Library of Congress might have preserved that junk. No matter. In the past I've deleted teaching blogs, a Mac blog, and a tumblelog that outlived their usefulness for me. Whether or not they got cached somewhere doesn't matter to me. I just didn't feel like maintaining them or having them show up in current search results. But I won't kill off a couple of my other blogs Clio and Me and Language for You, since they contain a few bits of useful information, and some of it even relates to what I'll be doing here.1 They're like the old notebooks that I want to keep around just in case, unlike the larger piles of stuff that went into the recycling bin. I'll probably also keep Commonplacing, a tumblelog in which I have been collecting random quotes.
So what will I blog about here? For starters, I would like to dust off the old dissertation, which I defended in 2006, and ponder what I might do with that research. Occasionally writing about that work should help me clarify my own thinking. As an added bonus, maybe this blog will also help me communicate with others who might be interested in similar issues. Time will tell.
'Tags can be a rich source of noise'
The title of this blog entry comes from a statement Cathy Marshall makes in “Do Tags Work?" The article takes a critical look at the value of tagging, that next big thing of social and other media on the internet, where one can find much hyperbole about the wisdom of crowds. While we know how to tag for our own use, we are much worse at it as a collective. To make this point she looks at how people tagged their photographs of a mosaic bull upon whose testicles one can spin for good luck.
This informative and amusing read is in TEKKA, a hypertext magazine that is usually priced out of my range at $50 per year, but which is now free for a couple months.
Why Skepticism about Global Warming?
I’ve been engaged in the Sisyphean task this afternoon of trying to correct the internet. (If you follow that link, scroll down to the cartoon.) I know it’s silly, but I could not help myself in the face of the question, Is Global Warming a Hoax? on BlogCatalog. Problem is, the question was meant seriously. And there were people who answered in the affirmative, as many do on every related thread on the BlogCatalog forums. So why even take the bait? … [See the rest on the Internet Archive.]
Talking Religion on Public Forums
Well, BlogCatalog has finally banned religious and anti-religious discussions from their main forums. I say finally, because those discussions have made the place more than a little unpleasant at times over the past year. People are still free to take advantage of BlogCatalog’s group feature, however, and talk about whatever they want there.
I believe that life online is akin to life in the physical world, and that the rules of civil discourse that I learned before the internet existed should still apply. To me this includes the stricture in everyday life on talking about religion in groups where there are a variety of sensibilities but little or no common purpose. No good can come from such a group slugging it out over whether God exists or not, what Christianity really means, and so on—not in a public space where anyone can join in.
My students have been able to talk about religion and society on a wiki I set up for my Western Civilization course this semester, but that’s different. There the students have a common purpose, and I’ve only needed to remind them of it a couple times.