I was on Tuesday’s edition of our “The Journal” podcast talking about my recent story on India, Covid-19, and accusations that the government is censoring social media over its handling of the crisis.
You can listen online here or find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or other services. It was out May 4 and is called “India’s Social Media Crackdown.”
Around February 15 – about month ago – I decided I would delete the Facebook and Instagram apps from my iPhone.
I haven’t quit these services entirely, and at this point don’t immediately intend to (I can still view both via a browser).
But I wanted to take a break given all I’ve been reading lately about how social media apps are engineered to hijack our attention in order to keep serving us ads. (What about Twitter? I have no plans to abandon the app for now, as its enormously helpful for following the news.)
I’d heard about people receiving plaintive emails and even text messages from these platforms attempting to get them to re-engage. So I figured I’d document my experience here.
While I’ve received some emails from Facebook, Instagram, especially, really seems to want me back. And I’m not even a power user, much less an “influencer.” I have several hundred followers, but less than a thousand.
Anyway, above are the five emails I’ve received from the service since I last opened the app. I also received two text messages, spaced just a few days apart, roughly two weeks into my hiatus:
Stay tuned. I may update this post as I receive more messages. Assuming Instagram hasn’t given up on me yet…
This snippet in Richard Brody’s recent New Yorker piece on the best movies of 2015 struck me:
The cinema’s self-conscious modernity arose when its makers put a virtual mirror into its lenses and revealed the filmmaking process in the films themselves. They reflected the world around the movie within the movie, the director on the screen. But television has outrun the cinema here, too, by replacing the mirror with an echo chamber; by means of social media, television has gone beyond reflexivity to become participatory. It has become its own story. “Transparent” isn’t about an elderly father who comes out as a transgender woman; it’s about the making of a show on that subject. “Mad Men” is about the making of a show about advertising people in the nineteen-sixties. Unlike movies, where reflexivity is a matter of aesthetics, TV has made it a matter of ethics, politics, and sociology.
Food for thought.
There’s some fascinating stuff here.
Blogging — at one’s own custom domain, as opposed to scribbling away over at Medium or penning an email newsletter — is cool!
Seriously, is it 2014, or 2004?
There’s a bit of a renaissance of real personal blogging here in NYC. Two of the original NYC bloggers have, after years of writing professionally and editing others, returned to their own blogs.
It started with Lockhart Steele, the founder of Curbed, Racked, and Eater, who started that media business on his personal blog.
Then the next day, Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor/blogger at Gawker, dusted off her blog and started writing on it again.
And:
There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in public with each other. This is how blogging was in the early days. And this is how blogging is today, if you want it to be.
It feels so good to link to both of them.
I’ve heard blogs classified as a type of social media. Maybe that’s true, and maybe not — I don’t care.
What I do care about is that my blog isn’t part of a system where its usefulness is just a hook to get me to use it. It works the way I want to, and the company running the servers (DreamHost) doesn’t care one fig what I do.
My blog’s older than Twitter and Facebook, and it will outlive them. It has seen Flickr explode and then fade. It’s seen Google Wave and Google Reader come and go, and it’ll still be here as Google Plus fades. When Medium and Tumblr are gone, my blog will be here.
The things that will last on the internet are not owned. Plain old websites, blogs, RSS, irc, email.
I knew if I waited around long enough, blogging would be the hot new thing again: Sippey, Steele, Spiers.
I have been blogging consistently here at Newley.com since January, 2002.
Streaks are important.
A couple of Tweets I appended to my last post:
Regarding the painting over of logos on the aircraft of @ThaiAirways flight 679. This is not in line with @staralliance crisis (1/2)
— Star Alliance (@staralliance) September 9, 2013
guidelines. It would appear that the official quoted was misinformed. (2/2)
— Star Alliance (@staralliance) September 9, 2013
A WSJ Southeast Asia Real Time post explains that such logo masking was once more common. But that was before social media:
A common practice by airlines trying to reduce negative publicity about accidents – masking their company logo on a plane involved in a mishap – is proving ineffective in the social-media age, when passengers and onlookers can snap photos and put out unflattering comments to a global audience within minutes of an incident.
And:
“It is now not considered best practice in the airline community to do this,” said John Bailey, the managing director of Icon International, a communications firm that also advises airlines on crisis management.
He pointed out that passengers and airport visitors commonly have smartphones with cameras, marking quite a different world than two decades ago when airlines commonly masked their logos on damaged planes.
“The environment has changed, and the challenge for airlines is infinitely more complicated. If an accident happens in a visible and populated area, the airline can’t hope to match the speed of response of eyewitnesses and survivors,” said Mr. Bailey, who previously worked with the International Air Transport Association.
The story is here, and begins:
There are more Facebook users in Bangkok than in any other world city. That is the somewhat surprising finding of a global ranking of the social networking behemoth’s users based on their metropolitan areas.
Bangkok has some 8.68 million Facebook users, followed by Jakarta (7.43 million) and Istanbul (7.07 million), according to a list published by the well-known international social media analytics company Socialbakers.
Please give the piece a read and — you knew this was coming — consider “liking” it on Facebook.
A quick follow up on my post yesterday highlighting the BBC video report on Dejchat Phuangket, a Bangkok motorcycle taxi driver and social media maven.
Thanks to Byron at Coconuts Bangkok for getting in touch to say that his site has also run items on Khun Dejchat.
The first post provides an overview of Dejchat’s work following the Valentine’s Day explosions.
The second is a longer interview with Dejchat. One interesting tidbit on offer here: The story points out that he created an interesting Web site about his hometown in Sisaket province. (Warning: The site employs auto-loading luk thung music!)
The BBC has a video report today on Dejchat Phuangket, a Bangkok motorcycle taxi driver who has become renowned for his blogging and Tweeting:
His mode of transport is one of Bangkok’s most basic – the motorbike. But it is Dejchat Phuangket’s command of cutting edge technology that has turned him into Thailand’s most famous taxi driver.
For two years, Dejchat tweeted and blogged about his daily life.
Whether it be the contents of his lunch or the state of the traffic, his wry observations and a steady stream of photos kept his small band of loyal followers amused.
Then on Valentines Day the news came to Dejchat’s part of central Bangkok.
An explosion partially destroyed a house being rented by a group of Iranians.
As the men fled the damaged building they threw explosives at a taxi and one of the men had his legs blown off. Almost immediately the blasts were linked to attempted attacks the day before on Israeli diplomats in Georgia and India.
As news of the explosions began to circulate, Dejchat was already on the scene.
“A foreigner was carrying a bag and an explosion happened,” he tweeted under his username motorcyrubjang. “He lost his legs but is still alive at Sukhumvit 71.”
What’s more, Dejchat — who you can follow at @motorcyrubjang — may just have the coolest Twitter profile page photo montage ever. (Click through to see it.)
(All emphasis mine.)
(Image: BBC.)
I wanted to share this cell phone picture of a T-shirt I spotted at a market in Bangkok’s Silom neighborhood last night.
Yes, it says “RE TWEET ME.”
Further proof — as if any were needed — of Twitter’s global influence.
Naturally, I Tweeted the pic, and Twitter user @_JustMelissa posted the excellent image below in response.
She wrote:
@newley love it! It’s like this one. I had to stalk this kid all the way down Silom for this picture.
So there you have it: Bangkok’s Silom ‘hood is a hotbed for Twitter-focused sartorial irony. Who knew?