It is the first weekend of spring

Twitter Shutdown and Leon Leon Activism: How Dan Sheehan and his work in copywriting became a successful rapper and bestselling author

There were a lot more people in the town square before they moved to other social media platforms.

Many people are worried about the future of the platform following the rapid-fire layoffs and resignations following Musk’s takeover. Some former employees took to the social media platform to say goodbye.

Many users followed suit, tweeting short eulogies for the platform. For some, like writer Dan Sheehan, gaining a platform on Twitter later allowed them to excel in their personal and professional lives.

“I built this following for myself, and that made me some of my first job offers in the copywriting space.” That’s how I paid the bills for a very long time,” he says.

Through the use of copywriting, he was able to dedicate time to writing a novel and it was made a reality through the help of a crowdfunder.

“The fact that I was able to keep the lights on, the bills paid, while writing the book, and then have the book reach that audience of over 100,000 people directly, none of that could have been done through traditional means,” he says.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/23/1138605036/twitter-shutdown-elon-activism-trump-career

Disability Twitter: A Perspective on a Black Hole Webcomic and its Impact on Immune-Poor Immune People and Artists

“For brown reporters, there aren’t that many ways for us to get our names out there and get poached by publications.” At the start of her career, Rasilla posted her work to Twitter, mainly music reviews, and eventually landed a job writing those reviews for a local TV station. She continued to get job offers and that eventually led her to her current job. Future journalists will not have the same opportunities as today, that is what she worries about.

Wendi Muse, a Ph.D candidate with multiple sclerosis, was an active member of ‘Disability Twitter’ for years. She sent masks from her personal stock as well as resources that were posted to help people get masks. She noticed a greater need for reliable N95 masks in the immunocompromised community.

Muse has been sending out over a thousand masks from his living room since January of this year. She does not think she would have reached so many people if it was not for her presence on the social networking site.

“It has been crucial because it’s been a way not only to learn more about the pandemic, myself and my family, but also to reach out to other people who are less fortunate and maybe either don’t have the information, or don’t have the access [to these resources].”

Despite the recent influx of new users on alternative sites, like Mastodon, Muse would be a huge loss if the end of tweets was to happen.

“I think that uneasiness of not knowing is making it more difficult, especially for people who are disabled, elderly, who maybe don’t have social networks in person right now.”

I am working on a centering strategy that involves taking a deep social media sabbatical. Despite the fact that I’m a writer, in a field with nonstop pressure to share, craft and amplify, I recently got off all platforms for two months. Instead of using social media, I talked to artist friends about it as a concept — why we use it, how it affects us and what boundaries we need. These conversations made me appreciate a deeper relationship with my friends.

I started my webcomic back in 2011, before “relatable” humor was as ubiquitous online as it is today. At the time, the comics were overtly simple, often drawn shakily in Microsoft Paint or poorly scanned sketchbook pages. The jokes were less punchline-oriented and more of a question: Do you feel this way too? The small daily struggles of missed clock Alarms, ill-fitting clothes and cringeworthy moments were written about by me.

But the attention was not all positive. I caught the eye of a person on the 4chan board. There wasn’t a particular incident that triggered the harassment, but I was a common target for such groups. I am a woman, the messaging in the comics is feminist leaning, and importantly, the simplicity of my work makes it easy to edit and mimic. People on the forum began reproducing my work and editing it to reflect violently racist messages advocating genocide and Holocaust denial, complete with swastikas and the introduction of people getting pushed into ovens. The images were prevalent on the internet, with websites like ruart not taking them down.

How much do I realize? Writing a daily haiku to remind me of the world? Reflecting on her experiences with Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram

Editor’s Note: Tess Taylor is the author of the poetry collections “Work & Days,” “The Forage House” and most recently, “Rift Zone” and “Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange.” She has sole responsibility for her views. CNN has opinion articles.

I started this year talking about a daily practice that’s made me feel more connected, content, and attentive: writing a daily haiku that makes me take note of the world each day. I’m still enjoying that practice: With all the rain in California, today’s haiku is: “So much depends/ on wet plum blossoms/ in my red wheelbarrow.”

Some people had stopped using social platforms. (“It felt as addictive as alcohol,” said a poet in recovery from both alcohol and Twitter.) Thaisa Frank said she was relieved to have had a concussion. She stopped using social media and rediscovered the attention span to read books.

I was a fraudulent environmentalist, leaving a trail of plastic packaging behind me. I noticed a connection between the garbage-y levels of my attention span and the physical garbage I was creating. It felt bad.

Other things disquieted me as well: the general tenor of rage. The strange woman or bot who began trolling me, leaving hateful posts. I was vulnerable and exposed to random fury since I might go online to like someone’s baby and suddenly be swept up in the day’s melee.

Finally, I noticed upsetting perception gulfs between my awareness of people’s avatar selves and their real ones. After reading about a friend’s mom’s death in social media, I noticed that she was still grieving but I did not realize that she was still alive.

Conversely, I ran into a friend who seemed happy online, but realized quickly after talking to her in person that she was actually in a very dark place. I felt that my time on social media was taking me away from real life experiences.

I spoke with at least a few artists who wanted to be named and others who didn’t. Carmella Guiol, who is a digital health educator based in Durham, North Carolina, said she was shocked by the fatigue and exhaustion many people share with social media.

She has been interviewing college students. She said that social media was cutting into their lives. “They feel like it’s this pressure that takes away from the time to actually live.”

My conversations were about the same themes. Despite the pernicious pressure to be “seen” and “liked,” most people I talked to shared their sense that the constant pressure to perform their lives for the algorithm had become alarming and stale.

She also talked about taking time offline to engage hard but necessary questions: What is a community? What are art practices you need to honor? What feeds your spirit?

Tiffany Shlain, a visual artist and author of the book “24/6,” talked to me about her decades-long practice of taking a weekly 24-hour tech-Shabbat, or day off screens, in which she “could host a beautiful meal, and journal in her notebook, and allow her creativity to come back in.”

Zapruder was skeptical about the future of social media, saying it was not really about whether or not we can handle it, it was about whether it is a force that actually spreads violence. Now he uses social only during certain hours, and only to amplify work he cares about.

I am off all platforms, so I am writing this article. I got a lot of good writing done these past months. I savored a lot of tender moments, too. I’ll probably post this article to social media, eventually. Later this summer and fall, I’ll be launching projects with the intention of sharing them. I want to hear from friends that I might otherwise not, because I am excited about some work that I have gotten to do.

I report that it’s good to be unplugged, and I will do it again. I was worried about missing out in the beginning. I did not.

A phrase I came up with during my time off was, ” You have a real life, not an advertisement for a life.” I wonder if there’s a way to go back online with more intention, less passivity. As Guiol put it, to “think about who is using who.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/24/opinions/social-media-unplug-poetry-taylor-ctrp/index.html

What are we doing with social media? Julia Guez’s “The Certain Body” poem about what we can do and what we shouldn’t do

I don’t want to be a zombie. It’s not good for me or for the world. The video artists like the one called Nam June Paik were able to use technology for art, but also remind us that we are here and should disrupt the machine.

Julia Guez wrote a beautiful book of poems called “The Certain Body” about illness and civic body issues, and was one of the best conversations I had while offline. There is a poem in her book that sums up life with insufficient cloud storage.

This poem imagined the cloud that carries our online personae as a real cloud, which had to hold all we send to it, before raining it down again. I have not been able to stop thinking about that image. That poor cloud, full of our rage, raining it elsewhere, raining it back down on us once again.

If I go back online, I only want to post and share what I would want to rain down on me, or a friend, or on the neighbor who one code calls me to love like a self.

After Covid, Guez went on tour with her book. She was reading poems about some of the things that sometimes inflame us on social media — police violence, Covid, our own grief — but she was sharing them in rooms and libraries and bookstores. “Afterwards, there was space to hug, to weep,” she told me. “And that was amazing.”

Guez, by the way, had some of the best rules for social media use of anyone I talked to. She told me that she wouldn’t be in the bedroom in the morning or before bed. “Mostly on the train, in order to find out other people’s good news, and amplify it, and sometimes to then to write a letter or actually call a friend who you’ve seen post something and check in on them.”

I love those rules. When I go back online, I’m going to use them too. I share Guez’s poem for now in the spirit of making people listen to voices they love. Maybe you’ll love it too.