Tag: twitter (page 1 of 1)

January 2, 2022 / 0 Comments

A Digital Reset and other links for the new year

Anil does a personal digital reset each year. I took this as a motivator to improve my relationship with Twitter. However, I didn’t do a complete unfollow as he does. Instead, I used Tokimeki’s unfollow tool. I dropped about 200 accounts. I also got rid of some lists. I found myself particularly interested in decreasing the news & politics accounts I follow (unless they were about Los Angeles), removing weak or no longer relevant work ties and people I might personally enjoy but not in tweet form.

What’s left?

  • people I know and like

  • good tweeters

  • basketball

  • Los Angeles

  • General Company Town and Streaming work follows

I really want to spend 30 minutes or less on Twitter most days (basketball and televised live events excluded), and I don’t want to be depressed after I’ve done so. Let’s see how it goes.

“The world is not generous with downtime. There’s always more to be done or things that could be done a little better. So to harvest the benefits of rest, you need to nurture it and protect it.” – Alex Soojung-Kim Pang in How to Rest Well

I’m in the middle of a two-week break from work but spent the first two business days of it working (even though everyone in our division was, in theory, also on holiday). Taking rest seriously seems like a worthy resolution.

“No 8 a.m. Meetings in 2022 ”

— Roxane Gay

‘Nuff said.

Do you spend your best hours checking emails, catching up on work, or doing tasks for your family? Try giving that time to yourself instead. Use it to focus on your priorities rather than someone else’s. You can use that hour or two for anything you want — it might be for a hobby, a project that you feel passionate about, time with your children, or even to volunteer and help others. Setting aside your best hours to focus on personal goals and values is the ultimate form of self-care. – Tara Parker-Pope in NYT’s Well Newsletter

Too many NYT links in this list, but let’s do one more.

Let’s leave the last word to Dawn Staley:

“I’ve never felt more Black than right now.”

exc-6150b66a8db10e38c5ef60a9
September 26, 2021 / 0 Comments

Soul Control

“Let’s keep these wheels in motion
Tell me where you wanna be”

— Jessie Ware

I deleted Twitter and Facebook off my phone this morning. On the latest episode of The Shop, Naomi Osaka, Wanda Sykes, Kevin Love, and Jadakiss discuss social media and the generally negative experience it has had on their lives. There’s a uniqueness to their situations as people of renown deal with many people with unsolicited opinions and advice.

Wanda Sykes noted that we’re told as kids not to talk to strangers, and yet, we get on these apps, and that’s all we do.

Jadakiss says he has to remind his kids and his team that the shit going on on Twitter is not real life.

Naomi Osaka only installs Twitter on her phone when she needs to tweet something, and then she deletes it again.

I was catching up on my stories last night: The aforementioned The Shop, Star Trek: Lower Decks, The Morning Show, and Nailed It. I sampled Foundation (keep it) and The Wonder Years (pass). And for about half the time, I was also swiping around Twitter. During Foundation, I realized that I didn’t want to be distracted ad yet there I was. I put my devices down, paid attention, and took in the experience in total. When I switched over to Nailed It, I remembered what the people had made by the show’s end and caught a lot of the small, hilarious moments that I fell in love with when it first premiered but that I have missed as the seasons have gone on and the pull of these apps gets stronger.

Again, this morning, I found myself going to Twitter when I merely intended to turn on some tunes and start my morning routine. Because of the tweaks and intentions I set early in the week about how I want my mornings to go; I could catch myself and course correct. I recognize how frequently those apps are vibe stealers.

Today’s wake-up from Headspace was about taking control of your tech experiences. The brief meditation asked me to think about the relationship I wanted to have with my tech, and there was clarity. I don’t need to be rid of these experiences altogether, but I don’t need them on my phone.

So Twitter and the always problematic (and rarely used) Facebook are gone. So are several social media apps that I never use but were sitting there waiting to pique my interest again and get me back on the sauce.

I’m grateful for a commitment to morning rituals this week. For music and chores and coffee making and meditation and journaling before being sucked into notifications and messages and the terrible or absurd or disappointing news of the day.

I’m grateful for evenings with music, journaling, and reading (I’m on pace to get three books down this week!), a set bedtime, and leaving devices outside the bedroom. I’m grateful for giving myself permission to break or tweak a rule when it serves a larger goal.

The days didn’t always go as planned, but I have found that my ability to navigate the days, be more present, be more gracious, be a better me improved with each day.

Now let’s see if I can keep it going. Removing those apps feels like a commitment to that plan.

exc-5fe8dba648c30047e6451e82
December 27, 2020 / 0 Comments

How To Do Nothing


how-to-do-nothing.jpghow-to-do-nothing.jpg

I’ve been off from work since Tuesday, and I’ve got two more weeks before I return to slacks and emails and zooms and the pandemic remote work struggle of balancing work and personal time.

“As far back as 1886, decades before it would finally be guaranteed, workers in the United States pushed for an eight-hour workday: ‘eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, and eight hours of what we will.’”

— Jenny Odell

During this extended leisure period, I’m still thinking about work or, more accurately, I’m thinking about how we spend time, how we value time, and how I show my team that I respect theirs. To show proper reverence for our most valuable commodity requires me to appreciate my own time and what I do or don’t do with it.

“Ah, let’s see what fresh horrors await me on the fresh horrors device.”

Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing opens with a Twitter quote that encapsulates how I often feel when I’ve spent too much time scrolling. Despite efforts to better manage the experience, the algorithms are better than I have been, and I will find myself in the doom loop refreshing and refreshing to find some new nugget that will spark a reaction in me. Joy is rarely the return on investment of that time.

Yesterday, though, I made some different choices with my time. Instead of endlessly swiping through tweets, I read up on the squirrels that roam the trees outside my home office window. That led me down a path to understanding more about the San Fernando Valley ecosystem. Later in the afternoon, when I opened The Wild newsletter from the LA Times, I read it more deeply, identifying things that might help me feel more grounded. Odell writes about having a stronger connection to the physical world around you is more real. It is an actual reality.

Our social media spaces generally lack the contexts necessary to feel real. They present distractions and solicit reactions but rarely in a meaningful way. Odell is quick to point out that she’s not suggesting quitting them all and never returning. “We have to be able to do both,” she says, “to contemplate and participate, to leave and always come back, where we are needed.”

Which raised for me this question: what do I go to each of these spaces to do? On Twitter, I most want to interact with my friends and acquaintances. Occasionally, I want to be entertained by digital culture (though maybe I’m getting that dopamine from TikTok more these days) or be in the mix of basketball chatter or Los Angeles happenings or catch up quickly on breaking news.

However, I rarely am looking to do all those things at the same time, and that is the social media platform trick. I come to see what my friends are sharing, and now I’m lost in covid news or trying to understand a meme or reading a trending topic. There’s no context. It’s a noise storm that I willingly walk into and remain for far too long.

I have different specific intentions for other platforms yet haven’t treated them with care or discipline either. I’d love an algorithmic reset button for Facebook and Instagram, but I will settle for revisiting my follows and actively thinking about my purpose when I enter them.

And to get engrossed in more soul-satisfying pursuits, including the act and art of doing nothing.

There is so much more to Odell’s book than merely a discussion of dealing with social media. It’s part philosophy, part history, part naturalist, part adventure. It is not, however, a how-to book.

It kept my mind ablaze throughout.

I highly recommend.

January 25, 2015 / 2 Comments

The Switch

“I’ll take nothing in place of you.” – D’angelo and the Vanguard, Betray My Heart

I was at Disneyland with my friends. It was around lunch time and we were enjoying drinks and a light meal inside the Carthay Circle restaurant in Disney’s California Adventure. We all were charging our phones a bit. Mine, surprisingly was at a robust 58%. Mind you, this was only 4 hours after it had stopped being charged by my car. It was after only light usage—I had done much less with it that morning than I wanted—but this is where my head was with the nexus 5. This was a win.

We packed up and walked over to Disneyland heading in to Tomorrowland and the line for Star Tours. At most, this was a 20 minute excursion. As we settled into the queue, I checked my phone again: 22%. 22 percent! I wanted to chuck it into the river as soon as we got near Tom Sawyer Island.

Instead, I exhaled. I had already made the switch. The iPhone 6 would arrive two days later.

Three weeks later and these are my thoughts.


As I write this, my phone is at 38%. I used my phone heavily yesterday and I haven’t plugged it in since yesterday morning.

I’m delighted.

Delight has been a daily occurrence since the switch. Business Insider quoted Tom Moss earlier this week who says he doesn’t believe Android is offering anything different that makes it more appealing than iOS.

What iOS, and in particular this latest version of the iPhone offers, though, is an enjoyable experience with lots of little moments that make you appreciate it all the more.

The novelty of being able to unlock and complete other security tasks with my thumb hasn’t worn off. The Today tab/widgets are used more regularly than my android widgets ever were. I say “Hey Siri” more than I said “OK Google”. The cross-device integrations are outstanding. That I didn’t have to set up anything a second or third time to use my personal hotspot with my laptop or iPad felt efficient. That I can see GIFs in iMessage and Slack. That I don’t need another app to see my text messages across my different devices. The size of the hard drive. The camera. Holy shit, the camera.

And, the apps I use regularly just work. I hadn’t realized how frustrated I was with rdio and waze and a few others not doing what I wanted them to on the Nexus until I got them on this phone and realized I wasn’t having problems. And some of them do a few more things in iOS than they do in Android.

With the iPhone, so far, I worry very little about apps refreshing in the background. I have yet to accidentally call or text someone. I have yet to worry about being low on battery life before the end of the day. And I use it more frequently for more things that I did my nexus. It’s weird how transformative it’s been.

Why the switch?

Battery life wasn’t my only complaint with the Nexus 5 in recent months but it was my biggest challenge. On a daily basis, I was thinking far too often about whether or not I would have enough juice to do what I needed to do during my normal routine. I’m not alone.

After installing lollipop, the phone seemed less responsive. Opening apps and swiping screens had a slight delay. In the past, that would’ve triggered my desire to buy the latest and greatest in the google line of phones but the Nexus 6—like the iPhone 6 plus—was way too big. The Samsungs look cool but also are stocked with bloatware that I don’t want and the iPhone 6 was the first in the iPhone line that truly intrigued me.

Switch. Switch switch switch.

What I miss

Because of some office IT politics, I have to access Microsoft Outlook through the web and I had an app on my nexus that regularly synced my outlook calendar to my google calendar so that I didn’t have to manage it in two places. I haven’t found a way to do that in iOS yet. I miss being able to swipe right and get Google NOW. The twitter app for Android (and iPad) supports lists. I haven’t been able to find them in the twitter app on the iPhone so I swap between it and tweetbot.

That’s about it.

I’m still learning the iPhone. I’m surprised with how different, yet similar, it is to the iPad in function. And I’m finding that adjustment and learning curve enjoyable. It’s been awhile since I’ve had to explore a new gadget and really figure it out.

Unlike some others, I have no regrets.

November 1, 2014 / 0 Comments

This Podcast Life

“Play with me and you’ll play with fire.” – Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Retreat!

It’s probably been eight or so years since I’ve regularly listened to podcasts. You know, back in the first hey day of the medium. Back then it was Left, Right, and Center and Wait, Wait and a few other shows from KCRW’s line-up that I was usually too busy at work to catch live. But over time, I shifted further and further away from iTunes as my primary music player so, at some point, the podcasts started to pile up and I declared audio bankruptcy and dumped them all and never looked back.

Well, never say never. A few weeks ago, Kevin Smokler tweeted:

Oh. It’s like that now? Serial was the game-changer, huh? One of those transformative efforts that elevates the space. So, I knew I wanted to check it out but first I had to figure out how people were consuming podcasts these days. I landed on Pocket Casts which is the first android app I’ve paid real yanqui dollars for in a long time. Then I asked what I had no idea would be such an involved question:

https://twitter.com/misterjt/status/525132817252904961

This was my most popular tweet this month (thanks Thinkup!) and I’m betting, by far. It was surprising to read how passionate people are about their podcasts. Outside of the occasional mention of This American Life or listening to Planet Money when Tiffany is driving, I hadn’t seen people writetweet much about the podcast but it’s going through a renaissance. Kinda like blogging I guess.

The maturation of these digital forms of expression that seemed to have run their course nearly a decade ago is hella cool. Podcasts, like blogging, were so meaningful to me then, it’s nice to see that we can come home again and find new things to love.

And with that, from all your recommendations, here’s what I’ve sampled and subscribed:

Serial – I can’t recommend this highly enough. It is truly a spectacular listen and obliterated my expectations.

DecodeDC – It’s amazing how difficult it is to decipher what’s happening in Washington these days with all the dark money (something they explained recently) and this weekly breakdown helps. A lot.

99% Invisible – Something about it feels a little hipster-y—an artisanal podcast if you will—but I have thoroughly enjoyed both episodes I’ve heard so far.

Snap Judgment – Out of Oakland, this is a hoot. Nerdy and black and fun, it feels like an old-timey radio hour but with new school freshness.

Planet Money – Like DecodeDC, excellent explainers in a subject I always struggle to understand. It helps that they are also quite funny.

WTF with Marc Maron – He publishes way more often than I can keep up with so I don’t listen to everything but his recent conversations with Larry Wilmore and Andre Royo were both great. 

Call Your Girlfriend – I’m biased because I (humblebrag) occasionally get to hang out with Ann Friedman but this is such a charming show. It’s also intimate. Even though she and Aminatou Sow are allowing us to eavesdrop, I almost feel like I’m not supposed to hear this. Especially as a man. But I will.

I’m also sampling the His and Hers Podcast which I’m not sure I love yet (it’s a little too unstructured) and, of course, This American Life. I still have Song Exploder and a few other recommendations like the TWiB network of shows to try out, too.

The really good podcasts are so compelling that I’m sad when my commute ends before the end of the show. It’s a great way to spend my hour or so on the bus and train to and from work.

I have questions, though: 

  • Do people talk about podcasts online or amongst friends a lot more than I realized until now or not?
  • If not, why not?
  • What makes Serial so transformative?

Oh, and is there something you’d think I’d like that I haven’t mentioned? I could probably listen to a couple more.

December 18, 2013 / 0 Comments

Drunk on Beyoncé

“I get filthy when that liquor gets into me.” – Beyoncé, Drunk in Love (feat. Jay Z)

I’ve talked about little else other than this album since it released Thursday night. Beyoncé’s self-titled visual experience is worthy of all the acclaim and as people, like myself, have spent an inordinate amount of time listening to it over the last few days, the critical discussions have been interesting dealing with a wide variety of topics far more lofty than simply what is good music, what makes a pop star, and is non-marketing the new marketing.

In the case of the first single, Drunk in Love, I got caught up in a facebook conversation  (of which I’m not going to quote others directly because it’s not a public thread) with Oliver Wang and some other knowledgeable music folks over Jay Z’s below average guest verse on the track. Specifically, the lines

“Catch a charge, I might, beat the box up like Mike/Baby know I don’t play…I’m Ike Turner…now eat the cake Anna Mae.”

— Jay Z

Mia McKenzie of Black Girl Dangerous argues that this is a glorification of violence against women and pretty much indefensible. This seemed to be the take of those in our FB conversation as well. 

I have a more forgiving take. Here’s what I said in the thread

“I’m not here to defend the rhyme because it is pretty weak sauce but I think I get the POV. There’s a lot of drunken sexual aggression in the song as a whole and jay z’s rhyme furthers that reckless abandon. They are f’n up the fine art. He’s too aroused to remove her clothing. He’s “beating the box up like mike”. In the context of their relationship and this moment, he’s “in charge” and maybe because the power dynamics of their relationship are well understood and agreed upon by both parties, this metaphor, while lunk headed is part of their sexual role play. My less kind take is that on an album filled with moments of Beyoncé’s power and dominance, that’s his moment to express his own power in an ugly, mysoginistic way. I’d like to think its the former.”

— me

The retort from others is that there are lines that are hard to defend once crossed like Lil’ Wayne’s usage of Emmitt Till earlier in the year. I was going to respond in the thread but felt like this was now blog worthy, so, here I will say I struggle less with this particular Ike Turner reference than I do with Lil’ Wayne’s invocation of Emmitt Till or Rick Ross’s date rape line or Robin Thicke’s questionable wordplay earlier this year because of Beyoncé’s agency in the creation of this song, her music as a whole, in how she presents herself, and in her relationship with her husband. Perhaps without that context, I would find it more offensive but the imagery associated and the lyrical content of the song and the album as a whole diffuses it a bit for me. 

Not just a bit. A lot. As me and Samhita Mukhopadhyay discussed later on twitter

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

I respect the idea, particularly in a week when we are revisiting the awful-ness that are R.Kelly’s aggressions against women, that we shouldn’t make light of domestic abuse and referring to myself as Ike Turner or threatening to “beat the box up” aren’t really part of my own bedroom playbook (but I’m terrible at dirty talk so what do I know. Also, I’ve said too much) but I’ve found it difficult to look at any parts of this album through anything other than Beyoncé’s POV. Even in this video, as her husband raps, it is she who stares into the camera. I read this as the night talk of two people expressing how they are drunk on each other. A love and lust so deep that statements and actions clearly inappropriate in mixed company are okay here. Desired even. In a relationship of equals you can get as nasty as you wanna be. Because the respect is a given.

Jay Z and Beyonce are not only partners—they’re artists. They both seem to respect each other’s creative freedom and expression. I have to imagine that they’ve both done or said things in their music that the other doesn’t love, but if this is your spouse, the person you face the world with, aren’t you supposed to let them be an individual? Jay Z clearly supports Beyonce being her own woman and likewise, Beyonce respects her man. That’s not a ho conceding to her pimp. That’s adult understanding and compromise.

-Kara Brown for Vice

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.


abandonhistoryslide.jpgabandonhistoryslide.jpg

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 1, 2013 / 0 Comments

November 2013 Personal Report

“From the outside everyone must be wondering why we try.” – Jessie Ware, Wildest Moments

November of two thousand thirteen felt like the first month of the year when all things in my life were on point.

Work has been great and I can’t wait to show you what we’re coming up with.

I made time for friends and family throughout the month and felt invigorated by their energy and love and warmth whether at Thanksoween, my sister’s house warming, dinner with Team Toney at our house, or now, with the In-Laws in Greensboro.

I said yes to just about every invite which presented me with Jessie Ware live, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and J.Rocc, The Book of Jezebel reading and signing event, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and a tour of the Grand Central Market.

I took care of me. I finally visited the doctor for the pain in my right leg that had kept me from working out for most of the previous six weeks. I took my medicine, followed the instructions, and am back to the gym in force and running at length. And, if you follow me on fitbit, ignore this past week. It’s too damn cold here for steps.

Our house is a home and not a sty. This is a big deal and very uncommon. Trust.

Others can be the judge of this but I know I made the effort to be more present, more accessible, and more concerned with keeping my commitments.

November is a time for gratitude. I’m grateful for whatever stars aligned to make it such a positive one for me in what has been a year of incredible ups and downs.

Thanks.

My Most Popular Tumbl: Los Angeles Neighborhood Stereotypes

My Most Popular Blog Post: 8 Moments That Show You Why Art Don’t Sleep in LA

My Most Popular Tweet

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

My Most Replied-To Tweet

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

My Favorite Tweet

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

My Most Popular Instagram



Using #movember as an excuse to see how much facial hair I can grow until Tiffany vetoes it.