The Failure of Social Media

6FPS V1#1 

Welcome to the first issue of 6FPS, my new email newsletter. I hope you enjoy it. I would love to hear what you think, good and bad, and the contact info to send me feedback is below. Thank you all for being willing to subscribe to something that didn't exist until today. I hope it meets your expectations.

I'm pretty happy with this issue; I think it shows what I'm trying to accomplish here, which is share some of what I'm doing, plus cut through the noise and chaos of the online world to help you find a few things you might otherwise miss. I hope they inform and delight you, or at least keep you entertained for a few minutes. I do expect to tweak the look and feel some more, but I like a simple and clean design, and I think this works pretty well.

I am in process of some redesign work of my main site and my photography sites on Smugmug and Flickr, and it's not as far along as I'd hoped it would be, so some of my photography topics are on hold until I get those finished. Overall, though, what you see is what you're going to get.

In general, the topics you'll see each issue are going to align with my core interests: Photography, birds (and bird photography) and the environments that affect them, the online world, especially online communities and social media, and the tech industry that has given me a way to make a nice living going back to the 1980s. I can guarantee that I'll color out of the lines on a regular basis as I see things that interest me ("look! shiny!") but in general, this is a good guidebook to the common topics.

One thing I do wish to point out: an aspect of my bird work and trying to protect and support our birds and their habitat is that these topics are going to involve dealing with the problems and challenges of climate change, and the politics and continued abuse of our planet that we as a species are inflicting on it. If you are a climate change denier, I expect this newsletter isn't going to be a place that reinforces your belief, and to put it bluntly, I'm not going to be too interested in attempts to discuss whether it's happening. We're well beyond that, and far into "can we minimize the damage enough to keep this planet livable?", and the answer to that is unclear.

And having said that, on with the show! And thank you for being part of this.

What's New?

Here are a few other things I thought you might find of interest:

  • Business Tripping to the Big Easy: My company, like most fully remote companies, pulls us all together for face to face discussions once a year. This year it was the Hotel Monteleone in New Orlean's French Quarter. Most of the week was work, but we did get to do some other things. And we ate well. Oh, boy, did we eat well.

  • Chuq 101: Four minutes about chuq: As part of the New Orleans trip, we all did short presentations, and as a relatively new person, I did mine on, um, me. So if you're curious about some of my background, this covers some of the highlights.

  • 20 years of clutter: the China Problem: Do you know how I ended up with three different patterns of china? Because I have to admit, we have no clue where that third pattern came from.

  • Silicon Valley Six Oh (OH!): a month ago, I turned sixty. I guess I'm officially old now. So get off my lawn so I can take a nap.

  • Harlan: Harlan Ellison died, and I had to talk about him. His writing was foundational to my own fiction, and in my few dealings with him over the years, I found him an interesting and complex person.

Things Photographic

Every issue I intend to talk about some topic involving photography, and to show off and discuss one of my images.

This issue, to be honest, the topic is that my photography is currently a shambles. I've had very little free time to pick up a camera, and when I do, I mostly think what I've shot is boring and ugly, especially when I try to shoot wide angels below 100mm.

To say this is frustrating is an understatement. To compound that with a schedule that hasn't let me go out and work through this current mind-cramp makes it worse. I have a couple of personal projects I want to kick off, but while I know what I want to accomplish, I feel completely lost at how to actually do them. My landscape muse has not only escaped and left me, on the way out she set my shoes on fire, giggling.

This makes me feel like a complete idiot and I want to hide, but I really shouldn't. I have gone through this before, and I know this sort of thing happens to creative types in their endeavours: it's the photography equivalent of writer's block. The way past is it simple: to go out and shoot crap, and try to figure out how to stop shooting crap, and at some point, I know I'll start shooting non-crap again, and then it'll become easier and more reliable until I can believe I'm a photographer again.

Which requires field time, which I haven't had. Of course, I know going out and shooting will be frustrating in the short term, which makes it easier to defer making the time to go out and shoot. It doesn't help that summer is always my least favorite and productive season, but fall is arriving a lot faster than I'm really ready for, but it'll mean better photography for me, at least.

My point to writing this: we creatives all go through this. It's frustrating, but knowing it's not just you can help. The solution is simple, at least in theory: go out and shoot, and when you shoot something really good, accept that and use it to help you go out and shoot more good stuff and less bad stuff. Fighting through these blocks, I've found, have no shortcuts and no easy answers: you just need to retrain your compositional eye to stop suggesting crap and then rebuild your confidence that you can.

And along the way, if you're like me, you'll have random thoughts of just throwing your gear in a lake and going and watching TV instead...

If you do that, you'll probably regret it. Just keep grinding and working to get your muse back. it'll happen.

Because I'm still working on the revamps of my image sites on Smugmug and Flickr, I'm not doing an image discussion this issue. I owe you one, and so there'll be multiple wallpapers for your use once I get those sorted out.

One Thing: The failure of Social Media

I am going to talk about this in more depth down the road, but I wanted to touch on our social media wasteland we find ourselves in. If you follow me on Twitter, you probably have seen me calling for the removal of executive leadership of both Facebook and Twitter. I believe both are toxic to their users and damaging to our society for their unwillingness to own up to being responsible for the effects of the content they distribute.

I will go further: I believe that we've built an entire generation of social interaction tools and systems online that are abject failures. They were built by technologists interested in the technology, not the people using them, and we see the result of that. I expect both Facebook and Twitter as we know them today to fail and be replaced, not immediately, but I no longer believe they can be repaired without major changes -- and let's not forget that when Facebook went public, the stock holders gave Mark Zuckerberg enough power that he basically can't be fired. Well done, everyone.

This reality is starting to come home to roost, and the narrative about both companies is increasingly negative and critical. Both companies are, way too late in the game, starting to at least look like they're trying to take these abuse problems seriously, but let's be honest: It's still perfectly okay in twitter's universe to threaten someone with rape or being SWATted, and to me, that means Twitter is still fatally broken and abusive to its users.

I've pulled back from using both services, and I'm happier for having done so. They are not good places for a healthy mental state these days, and unfortunately, changing that will be a long, slow and painful process, but it needs to start by replacing the people in charge with leadership that cares about their users first, and not the technology or advertising revenues. I'm not holding my breath.

What will replace them? I have no clue. But I'm seeing more and more people return to proven tools, and that's one reason I've started 6FPS. In mailing lists it's possible to create a safe environment for both myself and you, my readers, that we can both trust, and which won't be destroyed by some random business model change by a company that only sees us as widgets to be manipulated. Here, we can hold a conversation without worrying about it being interrupted by random outsiders who want to yell at us about whatever THEY feel is important.

Speaking of random business process changes, Facebook just changed what they allow us to do, and so we are no longer able to use tools to automatically share some content on Facebook. On a recent Recode Decode, Matt Mullenweg of Automattic (the owners of Wordpress) talks about many interesting things, but he specifically calls out this change as another attack by Facebook on the open web, and he's right. His interview is worth listening to on all of the topics he covers, but this view of Facebook's actions is one I hadn't thought of, but really resonated with me.

A couple more links on this topic that have gotten me thinking:

For Your Consideration

Reviews

To start 2018 I gave myself a challenge to finish two books a month and get back to reading more. About half of my reading is actually listening, since I hit middle age and progressive lenses in my glasses, I've discovered the joy of audio books, and that's helped me keep up the rhythm.

My reading splits into two main categories: Science Fiction and Fantasy, and history/biography, especially military history non-fiction. I also end up reading a sprinkling of business type books. As of August 1, I've finished 26 titles, and here are a few recent reads I can suggest you might find interesting:

  • The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Peter Frankopan): we all know the Vikings attacked England during their reign, but did you know their longboats ranged into the Mediterranean and beyond? I didn't, and that's just one tidbit I learned from this book, which points out just how "white christian euro-centric" the history we're taught is, and tries to show us how the rest of the world contributed to what we are today. A fascinating, highly recommended read.

  • The Armored Saint (Myke Cole): This book takes what starts out as a fairly straightforward medieval fantasy setting (aka "horses and broadswords") and builds a fascinating story within it that includes some amazing and unexpected dives into gender and other cultural issues you don't see in this kind of book. A fascinating read, and one of the books on my short list for award nominations. It's that good.

About 6FPS and Chuq

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (6fsp@chuqui.com).

Coming out about every two weeks, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

See you in a couple of weeks


And with that, I'll see you in a couple of weeks with the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along.

Until then, take care, and have fun.

Chuq

Copyright © 2018 Chuq Von Rospach, All rights reserved.