Category: Social Media

  • Why Musk Supports Trump

    It has little to do with politics. I’m a fan of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s work. Her brilliant 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, explored how a Tea Party community in Lake Charles, Louisiana, came to hold their political views, which became important in the weeks after the 2016…

  • Emotional Truths that Aren’t True

    Jonathan Haidt’s bestseller “The Anxious Generation” is a terrible book on which nobody should waste their money or attention. Last week I had the privilege and pleasure of joining Joey Dumont on an episode of his True Thirty podcast in which we debated the merits of Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling nonfiction book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring…

  • Musk’s Latest Antics

    On August 6, Twitter/X owner Elon Musk filed a frivolous lawsuit against an obscure advertising trade group; the timing is suspicious. As longtime readers know, I’ve written an intermittent series about Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. You don’t have to read those older pieces, nor must you care about advertising or know anything about GARM (the Global…

  • No, Musk’s Behavior Isn’t Hurting Tesla

    Headlines about a new report draw the wrong conclusions about what caused Tesla’s weak sales quarter and stock decline. Whoever runs PR for Caliber, the brand reputation consultancy, deserves a raise or at least a nice bottle of Scotch. Last week, a new “In tech we trust?” report from Caliber came out that contextualizes Tesla’s reputation…

  • Wendy’s, Google, and Instagram

    Three times the media missed important context in the last week. I read a lot of High Quality News and avoid the Low Quality variety (see the helpful way that Ad Fontes Media defines these categories). Even topflight news can be so focused on short term events that they forget to ask context questions, by which I…

  • Elon’s Just Zis Guy, Y’know?

    What the chattering classes missed about Musk’s very busy two weeks in November. (Image created by Ideogram.ai.) There’s a recurring segment on Sesame Street called “three of these kids belong together” where the viewer’s job is to identify a fourth kid playing a different sport, not getting rained on, etc. Let’s play that game with a slice…

  • Let’s Stop Calling it “Social” Media

    Calling Facebook, Twitter/X, TikTok and the rest “social media” downplays the negative aspects of those services and platforms. What’s the alternative? Image created by ChatGPT. We already know that words have power. We know that non Black people who use “the N word” are proclaiming themselves as racists. Decades ago, the LGBTQ+ community reclaimed “queer”…

  • Analog Power-Ups and Relationship Half Lives

    Without interaction, human relationships wither, but some interactions are more powerful than others. I don’t remember what prompted the question, but about a month ago I posted this on Facebook: “Hive Mind: Is there a word for a quip that comes to you far too late but that—if you’d thought of it at the time—would…

  • The Real Social Media

    The algorithmic rabbit holes of Facebook, Instagram, and Snap can isolate us, but could we use both today’s and tomorrow’s digital technologies to connect In Real Life (IRL)? Both in its etymology and our common practice “social media” is oxymoronic, like “jumbo shrimp.” The Latin root socius means ally (or similar words like comrade) and is a shared…

  • My 2023 Prediction… or Prayer

    Many thinkers end each year with a cluster of predictions for the next year. I have just one—and it’s more of a prayer than a prediction—about trust. The pressing question of our age isn’t new. The Marx Brothers asked it in Duck Soup (1933): “who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” In a recent Los Angeles…