Stay Gold?

My dear aunt recently took me to see The Outsiders as an early Christmas gift, a story she wasn't familiar with, but one she was game to see theatricized after all of its Tony Award acclaim.

The Outsiders is one of the first novels specifically written for and marketed to a YA audience and depicts the struggles of two gangs of teenagers, the Greasers and the Socs (short for socialites) who are at war with one another in Tulsa, 1967. One of the key plot points in the play (and the novel on which it is based) revolves around Robert Frost's poem, "Nothing Gold Can Stay." Although this poem is often taught as an elegy for youth and innocence, I've been thinking a lot about it in terms of the internet.

In this polluted media landscape, is it possible to find spaces where we can stay gold?

Building Thinkers

This month I participated in my first visual podcast with Tracy Clark over at Building Thinkers. We talked about lurkers in regard to one of her favorite questions "How Might We Create Space for Mindset Shifts in Learning Experiences?"

During the podcast we discussed some of the ways we can be more ethical lurkers online. One of the things I love about Clark's podcast is that she engages her guests in a "Think-tivity" that she later builds into a lesson plan for the audience. I've shared the podcast and the "Think-tivity" below. Give it a try and see if expanding the types of accounts you follow shifts your mindset.

Is The Sky Always Bluer On The Other Side?

In the last few weeks, very online people have been fleeing to and discussing their migration to BlueSky, an app that functions similarly to Twitter/X.

As I wrote to a friend: I'm sure there's lots of great stuff happening over on Bluesky. It's also a frenzied FOMO period where folks are trying to rapidly rebuild and scale communities on a new site. For sure, there's a benefit in being first to market, and for some it is an economic necessity to be there right now. But, no platform is a panacea and fully immune to the problems that plague/d other platforms.

This later point is what I think gets lost in the shuffle for most people. More people lean toward lurking than content creating. The needs they seek to gratify from the platform are to easily access content (whether for entertainment, professional needs, social connection, etc).

It's ok to take a pause before trying to rebuild or add another platform into your reading/lurking life.

I might be over at Bluesky, too, one day. It depends on my needs and whether or not Bluesky can gratify them.

My old, but still relevant, hot take on the demise of academic twitter in the London School of Economics Impact blog.

Also, the always hilarious McSweeney's also has a great take on the mass exodus to BlueSky that's definitely worth a read.

Good Reads

Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe is the BEST fictional book I've read about content creation and the phenomenon of lurking to learn. It's a hilarious and brilliant read. Margo's a 20 year old community college student who has a brief and lackluster affair with her married English professor and finds herself pregnant. Despite no solid financial or familial safety net and no support from the baby’s father, she decides to keep the pregnancy and raise the baby on her own. When all social safety nets fail her - unemployment, childcare, CPS - she turns to Only Fans, a social media site with pornographic associations, where content creators post nude photos and sell a subscription fee to folks who want to follow their NSFW content.

Where there has been many novels written about social safety net failures for young moms, this is the first novel I've encountered that overlays these struggles with the precariousness of influencer work.

Margo begins as an Only Fans lurker, watching successful content creators and then builds offline connections to collaborate. When she's ready to delurk and go live, she learns the brutality of the algorithm and how the platform's whims determine her earning capacity. But she also learns about the importance of writing to build connection and while there are only so many angles of one’s naked body that might elicit attention, what her some of her subscribers really want (and are willing to pay big bucks for) is someone to relieve their loneliness. It's her masterful use of language, and her crafty understanding of discoverability and cross-platform promotion that gives her a fighting chance of providing for her son.

Gratitude

There's much to be grateful for this year and reader, I count you among my blessings. Thank you for walking beside me.

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