Tracy Durnell brings up a good point about the importance of “lightweight interactions” in our digital communication. I remember the blowback against these kinds of “reaction messages” when they first became a thing. But I think Tracy is right that in a lot of ways, they keep our relationships strong:

The idea that lightweight interactions like a thumbs up or a “love it” comment are not valuable has, I suspect, grown out of a distrust of corporate-owned social media platforms mediating, coopting, and commodifying our interactions and engagements with each other. But, start learning about relationships and community and you quickly realize that these little exchanges are the glue that bonds us together. That relationships are built on repeated interactions, and that they must be maintained through continued interactions.

This essay on How Group Chats Rule the World (NYT Gift Link) is really great, and I agree with all of it.

The group chat can sustain indefinitely this thin wire of connectedness. Some might argue that this feeling is a deception, another screen-based way to stave off loneliness; I would say instead that it glows with potential. Because there is no practical end to the group chat, it can be a means of keeping the lights on, constellating a set of people who would otherwise be entirely separate.

You know an essay is going to be good when this is the preamble:

I am writing this piece in good faith (that you, as a reader, like to think more about the culture that surrounds you, whether it’s culture you love or hate or are ambivalent about) and that you are in turn reading in good faith (that I do not hate Taylor Swift, that this is not a takedown, that we’re talking about Swift’s image but we’re also talking about people’s reaction to that image).

But yes, this is a really timely and poignant piece by Anne Helen Peterson about Taylor Swift and the impossible trajectory of celebrity:

But sometimes, when you keep on winning — awards, sure, but also in your career — it doesn’t matter who you are or how hard you worked for those achievements. People are going to find it harder to root for you. It’s when domination turns into over-saturation: when honest missteps become weaponized, when the interpersonal comes to feel emblematic, when every move becomes overdetermined.

This is such a good point about music discovery and the abundance of choice:

Before Spotify, when presented with a new album, we would ask: why listen to this? After Spotify, we asked: why not?

I also like this sentiment:

On one level it’s impressive that Spotify can perfectly capture my musical taste in a series of data points, and regurgitate it to me in a series of weekly playlists. But as good as it has gotten, I can’t remember the last time it pointed me to something I never expected I would like, but ultimately fell totally in love with.

For that you needed someone who could go beyond the data to tell you the story: of the artist, of the genre, of the music they made. For that you needed criticism.

I love Tracy Durnell’s blog—it’s been in my RSS reader for a long time. In Building community out of strangers she makes a case for personal sites to be more… personal.

I like hearing about the trials and triumphs of other normal people’s lives, seeing what goals they pursue and what they care about enough to write about. I gather book recommendations from others’ reviews, sample others’ taste in music, and delight in the daily wonders of others’ worlds: the cat luxuriating in a strip of sunshine, the stream in the dappled light of an open forest, the neat-looking conjunction of lines on the wall they passed on their morning walk. While social media emphasizes the show-off stuff—the vacation in Puerto Vallarta, the full kitchen remodel, the night out on the town—on blogs it still seems that people are sharing more than signalling. These small pleasures seem to be offered in a spirit of generosity—this is too beautiful not to share.

I love that perspective—and this is exactly why I follow so many personal blogs. And yet I’ve always been a little scared to go there on this site. I’m supposed to be a professional! This is work!

Well, I think that 20 years into doing this tech thing for a living it’s time to start sharing a bit more about all my interests, not just the product stuff. So I guess this is your fair warning that you might start to see more of that here!

PS. Tracy also updated her blog roll (remember those!?) and I am definitely going to add one here as well.

This is a bleak take, but I have to admit that I am also concerned.

I believe we have some personal agency. I also believe that a 12-year-old’s mind is no match for a giant corporation using the most advanced AI to manipulate her behavior. Gen Z were the first generation to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us before we had any sense of who we were.

Excellent post by danah boyd, reminding us that with social networks it all comes down to nurturing the network dynamics, not the technical features.

That’s the thing about social media. For people to devote their time and energy to helping enable vibrancy, they have to gain something from it. Something that makes them feel enriched and whole, something that gives them pleasure (even if at someone else’s pain). Social media doesn’t come to life through military tactics. It comes to life because people devote their energies into making it vibrant for those that are around them. And this ripples through networks.