Category: Social Media (page 1 of 1)

Brittany Luse, podcast host of NPR's It's Been A Minute

August 11, 2025 / 0 Comments

The Podcast that is Keeping Me Sane Online

“It’s the phones,” Brittany Luse lamented on a recent episode of It’s Been A Minute. She wasn’t wrong. Lately, I’ve been losing hours to the endless loop: Threads, Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, LinkedIn—rinse, repeat, regret. That conversation with her guests pushed me to act. I hid the worst offenders behind Face ID so I’d have to want them to open. Now, if I switch away mid-scroll, I have to go through the process again. It’s only been a few days, but I’m already feeling a sense of relief from the digital noise, with more time for things I enjoy.

This isn’t the first time Brittany Luse has helped me navigate my life online. I used to be pretty savvy about digital culture, ahead of the curve on the viral thing friends dropped in the group chat. But since quitting TikTok back in January (when it looked like it might vanish from the U.S.), I’m often late. TikTok had become my first-stop newswire for internet nonsense. Leaving it showed me just how addictive it was, and how much I’d relied on it to feel “in the know.”

These days, I’m less interested in being first to a meme or scandal. I want to understand what’s happening, decide whether it matters, and think about it without rotting my brain. It’s Been A Minute has become my best shortcut, at a time when, despite the cultural capital we’ve placed on hot takes, real understanding is more valuable than being the first to know and react.

Take the Coldplay Kiss Cam. The clip gave me the ick, and Luse’s conversation with Kate Wagner mirrored the exact dinner-table debate we’d just had at home. Or when my For You feeds started to flood with references and clips to the business of Christian music, Luse’s timely episode grounded me in the basics of a pop culture space I barely knew.

I look forward to listening to her recent shows on Hasan Piker and Jubilee, as they cover topics I have only a passing interest in, but want thoughtful frameworks for understanding.

I wouldn’t call myself a “podcast person.” If your show is over 30 minutes, rambles without purpose, or isn’t hosted by journalists, I’m out. But for this moment in my digital life—where I want less noise and more clarity—the format works. I still prefer audio over the pivot to video, and Luse’s twenty-minute doses feel like the right size to get informed and move on.

It’s Been A Minute isn’t alone—The Journal explained Labubus, and On the Media poured cold water on AI hype—but Luse has been the most consistent lately at picking stories I wouldn’t bother untangling myself, and helping me think about them in ways that stick.

If you want to give less of your attention to the churn of online life without feeling completely lost, give a minute to my current favorite podcast.

Leslie Jones and Sparky, the Los Angeles Sparks' mascot, are singing courtside at Crypto.com Arena with each other.

May 23, 2025 / 2 Comments

Loving the WNBA in a Season of Change

How can I follow the WNBA without being online? There must be a way because being online with the WNBA makes me want to drown myself. I hate all of you! And the biggest reason I can’t stand online WNBA discourse: it’s hardly ever about basketball.

Bomani Jones

Women’s basketball is on the rise. Many more people are watching at all levels. The players are securing the type of fame and notoriety that they have long deserved. Money is pouring in through exposure and expansion, and the paydays will soon follow.

But alongside the good tidings has come a growing fanbase, some of whom seem disinterested in respecting the WNBA’s culture, vibe, or history. All the things that I have cherished over 11 summers as a season ticket holder with the Los Angeles Sparks and cultivated as a fan of these athletes since before the league began.

I attended SXSW religiously between 2005 and 2011. In ‘05, the tech part of the festival was mostly a sideshow to the main event film + music tracks. Tech was active but quaint. There was little fanfare and a lot of camaraderie. It felt like we were all in on a secret: the internet was cool. By 2010, the event had grown so big that I half-jokingly said there were enough other black folks in attendance that I could afford not to like some of them. By 2011, I felt like an outsider and decided it would be my last.

A week before the 2025 WNBA season started, I worried that this summer might mirror my separation from SXSW.

“This might be the summer where we start losing the magic,” I said in the group chat.

The online discourse was overwhelmingly driving that feeling of dread. After months of quiet, the battle lines reappeared in the culture war over Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese—stans vs. fans, bluster vs. reason, aggression vs. inclusion. The tribalism that is a hallmark of college basketball fandom was rearing its ugly head during the draft and training camp as social media stans caped for their school’s players and jumped in the mentions of any person who dared critique them. Wannabe basketball influencers delivered hot takes in bad faith, seeking attention and engagement.

A play caught my attention while watching the opening weekend matchup of the Chicago Sky at the Indiana Fever with the sound off. I commented about it on Threads: an off-the-cuff observation that in most basketball conversations would be pretty milquetoast. It happened to be about Angel Reese in reaction to a hard foul from Caitlin Clark, though, and it brought to my doorstep the exact kind of interactions I don’t want to be having around this sport I love.

The home opener for the Sparks was the next day, and I was anxious like a kid on the first day of school. I often say that Crypto.com Arena has long felt like church. I go there to find fellowship, community, and to feel the spirit. Well, my spirit, at least. Even when we lose, those three hours are my respite. But this summer, there were changes afoot: our long-time in-arena host is with the expansion Golden State Valkyries; our long-time account reps had been replaced; there had been little communication from the organization about what to expect.

I need not have worried, though. While some things had changed, the good vibes were in plentiful supply. Familiar faces greeted us everywhere, and friends new and old were all around us. Neither the bad actors present in Indy the previous day nor the ever-present online drama followed us into my sacred place.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship with social media recently. The telltale signs that I need a break from the apps are here: increased time spent, decreased satisfaction with the experience, doomscrolling, and fomo. Despite my frustration with some interactions, discussing the W online is still one of the best parts of today’s internet.

Unlike Bomani, I don’t hate this community. He must not run in the same circles I do because I still make meaningful connections with WNBA fans via online social spaces. I find plenty of folks who want to talk basketball. On a different episode of Jones’s podcast, Elle Duncan compared WNBA fans to NBA Twitter—caring and communicating about the whole culture of the sport from the games and its stars to fashion, jokes, memes, themes, and even the playful pettiness of fandom. All that is still here if you know where to look and who to give your time to. The rhythm, hustle, flow, and beauty of the W are also represented by its very online community. It might be dispersed across many networks but hasn’t gone anywhere.

Just because the barbarians have broken through the gate, that doesn’t mean we have to cede our ground. I walked away from SXSW, but I’m not giving up on the WNBA. It’s my home. It’s our house.

There’s too much magic amongst the mess. There’s too much love in the game.

Seasons change, we remain.

January 12, 2025 / 1 Comment

City of Stars, City of Angels

My mom sent a picture of her view in the northeast corner of the Valley early Friday evening before sunset.

I didn’t understand what direction she was facing. I thought it might have been the Lidia Fire burning on its last legs east of her or the Kenneth Fire to her southwest. She texted that she was looking due south to the mountains behind Encino, just a neighborhood or two over from us. She sent a second pic as dusk turned to night, which shocked me, and I looked out our window to deep red plumes, dark smoke, and flames exploding from the back of the hillside. The mountains often feel close enough to touch from our vantage point, five miles away. It was the first time I thought we might have to evacuate, not just in this wildfire disaster but in any Southern California disaster of the last twenty years.

We checked our go-bags, filled a few extra pieces of luggage, and confirmed we had everything necessary, like my passport and booze. Tiffany packed the car so we could be even more ready. As our ongoing crisis in LA moved closer than ever towards us, I turned on the TV and found local news. It was surreal to watch and hear broadcasters talk about firefighting efforts that we could see occurring in real time every time we looked out our dining room window.

Although the evacuation warning zones were within walking distance of us, The fact that an evacuation center was set up less than a mile from our home comforted me as we slept in our beds.

The following morning, the sun shone, and the winds were calm. White smoke over those mountaintops seemed like welcome progress. I sought out trusted local and national sources for additional context. I used the non-profit app Watch Duty for updates. Tiffany turned the local news back on. The battle raged throughout the day with meaningful progress as we hit dusk. This morning, after I had slept hard for ten hours, we awoke to clear skies where the inferno had raged 36 hours prior.

What I had little desire to do over that time when the crisis was so close to home was jump to social media.

I’ve seen tremendous value in social networks as a utility this past week: it’s great for finding out if loved ones, friends, and acquaintances are safe; mutual aid networks scale awareness for those in need quickly in these spaces; if you’ve tuned your feeds right, you might see things that deepen your understanding, build your resolve, make you laugh, or remind you that the folks you know and follow are primarily lovely people who want to take care of each other.

On the flip side, though, seeing the in-the-moment thoughts of seemingly everyone near and far, especially during a crisis, is terrible for the psyche. As LA burns, we’ve been reminded that the owner of the largest and most used networks has no discernible moral compass beyond attempting to protect himself and his business. Misinformation, disinformation, and hatred run rampant, pushing people to debunk and counter those narratives.

None of that is helpful. Much of it is harmful.

TikTok will likely disappear in the US by the end of the month, and I’m not sure I will miss it. The time I spend consuming content is overwhelmingly empty calories. I could be spending that time reading or idling, granting my brain a more hearty diet than the dopamine rush.

The communities I enjoy interacting with on Threads may not survive Mark Zuckerberg’s MAGA machinations, and I will miss that if it happens. However, I’m not sure I have the energy to invest in another Social Media space beyond distributing my blog. The other upstart networks just haven’t been my thing.

I don’t want to chase your attention. I don’t want to be your audience. I want to be a part of something real.

When real shit goes down, these digital networks only simulate community and often through a funhouse mirror.

Real human networks come together directly. Like this week, the city of stars has proven itself as a city of angels every day, especially in times like these.

At times, we might use these platforms to help facilitate coordinated action but they aren’t are our only resource and likely aren’t even the best.

The best might be just going where you’re needed and asking, “How can I help?”

December 2, 2013 / 0 Comments

Ephemera

“Now she’s long…long gone.” – The Black Keys, She’s Long Gone

When there are events in the world, the event and the conversation surrounding it unfold on Twitter, the entirety of the experience of that event can be much more rich and engaging and deep on Twitter…The challenge when you try to put these event experiences on Twitter in front of people is they need to both capture all the best tweets, you really want the best tweets so you don’t miss those, and yet if you only show the best tweets, you lose the roar of the crowd that really makes Twitter awesome.

–Dick Costolo

I’m at my mother-in-law’s house in Greensboro, North Carolina. We arrived last Monday after a red eye flight from Los Angeles. My internal clock was still adjusting. So, when 8pm rolled around—or whenever it is that Sleepy Hollow comes on, I DVR it at home so I really don’t know—I wasn’t watching. My twitter friends were, though. The running commentary in that moment was more frustrating than entertaining as I wasn’t sharing the experience at the same time.

I watched the episode a few days later via FOX’s iPad app. It would’ve been nice to be able to replay what my friends were saying when they had watched it. But twitter isn’t built like that. Neither is facebook or most of our social web, for that matter.

Most tweets have a lifespan of less than 30 minutes. A facebook post maybe an hour. Instagram limits how far back you can scroll into the past. So, if you’re not on those services right now and someone is writing/posting about something you care about, you’ve missed it. I’m sure this seems mostly okay in this digital world that we’ve been playing in over the last ten years.

This is a world where people willingly, perhaps gleefully, dump their history as they jump from service to service or account to account. But, I wonder. Maybe we go with this because we haven’t been given other options.

Maybe this is why a service like Pinterest is performing so well. Pinterest provides the “river of news” but that’s not why people use it. People use it because its boards are memory books. You know what you post there will be easy to find later. It will be categorized. And everyone else is doing the same thing. Pinterest collects ideas, wants, and desires and stores them. You could use Tumblr in a similar fashion by searching tags or exploring an individual tumblog.

But who is collecting and collating thoughts or images around a topic in an easily searchable, inherently social way? How do I relive the Jessie Ware concert I went to two weeks ago via all the pictures, videos, and tweets that I know were posted because I saw them getting created? I’ve tried to do this several times over the last 6 months and have always felt unsatisfied with the attempt.

What about an important news event that happens while I’m sleeping or in a meeting? Why can’t I timeshift the social web like I can my favorite tv shows?

We’ve made the modern web ephemeral and, in doing so, I think we’ve robbed ourselves of turning shared digital experiences into true memories that have meaning beyond those brief instances when we’re all tapping away at the same time. I hope the next wave of big digital ideas tackles this.

It’s the kind of stuff I get excited about it in my own work conversations.

Projects like Thinkup make me think I’m not the only one.

December 18, 2012 / 0 Comments

The Story of Yay (or why I’ve stuck with Flickr)

“My heart will never feel, will never see, will never know.” – Grimes, Genesis

One of the things that I’m most proud of from the last 5 years is that, for a time, I was the #3 result for the word “yay” in google image search. I’m down around #8 now but it’s still my own little piece of recent internet ephemeral fame. The story of that picture is one thing but the story of how it became so highly ranked is pretty straightforward. Flickr makes images easy to find. Someone that I don’t know was looking for a “yay” picture to go with an article and found it (either through flickr or their own googling) and…magic.

They had every right to use my photo. I use a Creative Commons license on Flickr that allows for non-commercial usage with attribution. I suppose I could quibble if the site is ad supported but I was able to make these decisions about my pictures. I can make it on an individual basis. I can share my photos as widely as I choose. Be that one other person or the world. I pay for the privilege. I’ve done so for many years now.

The conversation around Instagram and their Privacy Policy/Terms of Use changes the past few days ties nicely in with Anil Dash’s post from last week about the web we lost. I remember when the Flickr community participated actively in helping to form and re-form the policies around the service that still persist today. I remember the many heady conversations and points of view and how it felt, even if it wasn’t necessarily the case, that the whole community was engaged and invested in the outcome. That the instagram community has reacted similarly seems like a throwback to that time.

That may just be what’s in my field of vision, though. Unlike on Flickr, I struggle to make sense of the broader community on Instagram (probably because there isn’t a meaningful web experience) so who knows if the masses actually care. It was a reminder, though, that Flickr does care.

And pretty much all of the moments of the last decade that I care about that were lucky enough to be captured in an image (still or moving) are on that old photo service.

Like nerdwedding11.

And SXSW.

And the Yay Flag Opening Ceremony.

See you around the old neighborhood.

October 1, 2012 / 0 Comments

Final Thoughts on Social Media Week Los Angeles

“I always thought it was a shame the way we have to play these games.” – The xx, Sunset

By the end of Social Media Week Los Angeles, I had seen some interesting talks from big players in the space. MWW Group hosted a panel of brand advocates from Uber and Subaru and Vitamin A that dug in a bit on the most pressing question I think all brands have as they navigate social networks: how do you maintain an authentic voice when a PR flap takes place, when customers have legitimate complaints, when you make a misstep in one of your postings?

Anthony Zuiker’s conversation about digital video storytelling followed immediately by a roundtable with the largest of the digital video studios in LA inspired me to take a much deeper look at that world and excited about the possibilities of “New Hollywood.”

But, ultimately, I was left most impressed with the folks still really trying to figure it all out — the local hospitality and travel folks, the food writers and business people, and the more civic-minded people I mentioned last week.

Their audiences featured people furiously scribbling down notes and asking really nuts and bolts tactical questions. It was a reminder that no matter how fast it feels like we’re moving, these technologies and services and ways of communicating are still in their infancy. Things I might take for granted as being well-known or understood, really aren’t.

They still require the conversation. Like the one I had at lunch of really smart industry folks on my last day at the conference as we discussed the future of television or the one we had last night at my parents’ house as my mother revealed her strategy for posting on facebook and how she’s on twitter but doesn’t use it because she doesn’t “get it.”

We’ll have to talk about that more, I thought. And not online.

If anything, the biggest takeaway I got from Social Media Week is that “social” is the most important word in “social media.”

We can discuss strategies and tactics and messaging and blah blah blah but this is what is true: humans interact. They relate to each other, or not. We try to use all the tools available to us to better be heard or to better listen.

And, for all my love of twitter and tumblr, it hasn’t replaced the power of people breaking bread together, talking, growing closer, and, occasionally really figuring some things out.

September 25, 2012 / 0 Comments

Trolley Jollies, Invisible People, and a City of Angels at #SMWLA

“Why see the world when you’ve got the beach?” – Frank Ocean, Sweet Life

I arrived at Mark Horvarth’s Keynote ten minutes or so into it, running late from my lunch at the Roosevelt. This was an after thought on my schedule. I knew the name Invisible People somewhat but not enough to resonate with me that this was an important topic.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. As I arrived, Mark was just pressing play on a video interview he had done with a woman living under a bridge. “I’m not a doctor,” he said, “but I could see that she was dying under there.”

He showed an animated video explaining how someone might get to that situation.

He explained how close he had been to that situation himself. How precariously close he was even today after all the amazing accomplishments his efforts had brought about for the homeless. But he felt accomplished. Changed.

“Never miss the opportunity a crisis provides,” he said.

Despite tailoring my first day at Social Media Week Los Angeles to be hyper-focused on the southland, I hadn’t expected the vast majority of the talks and conversations I would attend and have to be so centered on the people of the city.

I shouldn’t have been. There’s a myopia that comes from spending most of your work day tackling marketing and promotional tasks.We talk a lot about tactics and metrics and tools and messages. Those things have their place but the reality, as it always has been, is that the internet is made up of and about people.

This should not be mind blowing but sometimes, like today, it is.

It was great to hear about KCRW’s social strategy first thing this morning but the real celebrity sighting was Lan-Chi Lam, LA Metro’s communication strategy manager–one of the brilliant people behind the Carmageddon moniker and who is preparing us all for the sequel this weekend.

She delivered my favorite term of the day: Trolley Jolly.

She was also a member of the “A City of Angels” panel which was about how we use social media to make our neighborhoods and communities a better place. That was a running theme. My final panel of the day was called “Nobody Walks in LA” featuring a gaggle of people who do nothing but. And this theme of community–real community where we know our neighbors and our streets, where we are less strange to each other, where we sit behind screens not to retreat but to connect in real and meaningful ways–is now my entire focus of this week.

I had come planning to be inspired about the future of digital media and work. Now, I’m already re-engaged with what I fell in love with online in the first place, how these tools give us voice and bring us closer together.

Let’s go.