Digital Declutter or Death to the Facebook Algorithm.

How do you access the internet? What devises do you use? Where?

For me it’s Desktop and Mobile, work and not work, studio office and elsewhere.

When ‘in the office’, browser access tab by tab I tend to check notifications but not general feeds and update. On mobile however I find myself mindlessly opening social media apps in oblivious rotation scrolling between Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

This time last year (the start of 2021) the compulsion was disturbing and distracting. Delete the apps. It’s quite liberating as a small step of self control. Waking in the morning my thought processes did not immediately turn to mindless scrolling. Habitual energies are not always reinforced positive pathways.

I challenge you to delete those apps that you know are facilitating mindless scrolling.

From my mobile today I deleted Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.

Pausing, taking deep breaths while looking up at the ceiling is ok. Be present. It’s surprisingly rare with the ever ubiquitous wifi and internet enabled to hand devises.

This has been a peculiar post to write. People become quite defensive about having their capacity to manage their scrolling habits challenged.

I highly recommend the holding of an icon, get the jiggle, action the options menu and select delete from devise. Yes you can re install at any time. It’s a modern life lesson that needs to be more that a theory.

Do it!

There will be a momentum, As with last year I eventually returned them to my routine but with reflection and mediated internal dialogue.

I have more liminal cognition to explore. Duolingo at the very least forwards my aspiration to comprehend a second language.

I’m tempted to remove news apps as an exercise. Recently the Facebook current affairs news feed has fed my news scrolling. I’ve seen the Social Dilemma and Removing Facebook was deliberated because I found the news received was dare I say it well balanced between hard news and magazine fluff. It had to go! It’s Facebook for fuck sake. Bubble inducing, oblivion prescribed cul-de-sac for my mind, body and soul. The coming together of those 3 components is not best realised through Facebook.

Death to the algorithm. It is not my friend.

If this resonated with you. Delete just one app. Let me know in the comments. If you feel it’s an unnecessary exercise, all power to you. Only you really know the truth.

Wow that’s a whole new train of thought!

Thanks for reading.

PS. The irony is not lost on me that this post is shared to Facebook and Twitter. This is about mindless freedom. Closing a door while keeping the windows open!

Kicked by ‘the’ algorithm

There are so many. Algorithms not Kickings!

Media should be made for your audience. Content should be created for the consumer.

There is a change taking place in my soul and my life is transposing on November 1st. I find the world a discontinuity. I don’t really feel part of it. I try to find a way to be part of it but ultimately when I do follow the current wisdom the world shuts me down.

Can I be more explicit to provide a context? I do concede this is deeply digital and dare I say ‘a bit meta’ but ironically that concept is the prescient Big Bang in the social media universe right now, the dawning of the mainstreams attention being turned to the Metaverse! From LegendQuest to SecondLife this time should be mine.

Everything anticipated in virtuality and augmented space is staked in the recent announcement from Facebook externalising corporately as Meta.

I find myself on a chasm bank with no way across.

From a working class background with roots on London’s east end that moved to the midlands in the early 70’s. My parents were from London families tempted to the provinces lured by the new wave of council house estates.

So the kicking…
I haven’t made media for intentional public consumption in a while. I’ve been keeping my hand in and recently been attending some social media for business webinars funded my East Midlands Chamber.

I haven’t been pushing my output. I’ve been present but undemanding. Traffic was as I expected. I post the hits increase. This time I took an opportunity to livestream from Instagram after rediscovering IGLive and from Twitter. It was underwhelming to say the least. I did a couple of audio tweets too. All went no where! Silence. And the feeds changed taking away the conversations I was following as a member of audiences of creators I was tracking.

Well here it is. The mini vlog from the event I covered. It was a favour. I was hoping to at least add some views to their activities.

Any advice or insights welcome in regards to my cold shoulder experience and proverbial pistol whipping from the algorithms that is the social web.

Facebook is Back

Facebook is back. Just before Christmas. No, just before New Year, I removed Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram from all of my mobile devices. I did this because I was constantly checking them, and they were constantly there, and the icons, burned themselves into my retinas. Every time I looked at my screen they were the things that I compulsively went to. And it wasn't because I wanted to know what was going on but it just became habitual. And that felt wrong.

I wanted, and I always wanted social media to be an augmentation to my understanding of what's going on in my day to day. It's a way of making sure that information is being brought to me, and that if there are projects I'm doing, I can disseminate content to the audience and partners. That had changed.

Some people have New Year's resolutions. I like to have a word for meditation. And this year (2021) it's mindfulness. It's been interesting that some people have some negative connotations when it comes to mindfulness and the sentiment that it imbues. However, for me, it is a way of centering my thinking whether it's social, or business or personal.

So, DinoHack is a project that for the first time since the start of the pandemic, I'm going to be focused on for more than one day a week. And this means that I have time to do the digital marketing, I've been trying to find someone to support the digital marketing that PCM projects and PCM creative does on each project, but I've found it really hard to find somebody. DinoHack needs to have social media marketing. And I realise that, I'm perfectly capable of doing it, I was a bit unsure as to whether I knew enough anymore because it changes so fast. I delivered workshops on social media in 2010. And we're now in 2021. That 10 year old knowledge, some of it is relevant and it gives me a really firm foundation for what social media is, but what social media has become is something very different.

So Twitter made it back onto my phone quite early on, for reference rather than posting. I don't post as much as I used to, and I don't feel that I have to.

Instagram, made it back onto my phone because of the project I've done for Cromford Mills, which is exploring the augmented reality capabilities of Instagram because Cromford Mills, AR Cat Game is using Instagram, as its foundation technology. Christian Venables has been working with me to create an augmented reality mini cat game for Cromford visitors. So that's why Instagram made its way back on

LinkedIn, didn't really go anywhere. I just realised that I really need to pay a lot more attention to it, and it's never really had a structured build, it just had stuff from my CV that I think people might be interested in, it's not really very structured. Of all the platforms, it's unique to itself really, and everybody should have a LinkedIn profile if they are serious about doing business. And when I mean doing business. I mean that could be business to business it could be business to customer but if you are registered as self employed, as a sole trader, anything higher than that.

People specially in the entertainment industry in the creative arts, don't always see the necessity for why they need LinkedIn, but I promise you, it is absolutely vital. Over the last few days, When I've been looking for Prime contacts to contact for DinoHack, LinkedIn, and the Contact Relationship Management, that goes around that, Apollo plugs into LinkedIn is just pure gold dust.

So Facebook is back. And Facebook is back because buffer is back. Buffer is going to be the way that I line up articles that I find about and for DinoHack to be able to release content over time, so I will be able to spend 15-20 minutes or as I am browsing news which is what I tend to do I use features which will push content out to social media and buffer is the way of being able to to ‘buffer’ that.

So, four times a day, any of the platforms that I manage, I will be able to put an article on there. And as I keep doing it if I do more than four a day, then that backs them up for the next day and the next day the next day and then you start to build up that that archive of content.

There is a caveat of warning on this. However, if you are automating, and you are automating a topic which is likely to be current affairs news. If something happens in the news, that means that the articles that you're pushing out could be an appropriate, you need to be able to know how to lock down and stop your feeds going out automatically. And that's the case for any social media, automated feed. I mean even a live stream which is automating the liveliness of content. If you are going out live. You must always have a way and a protocol of shutting that down if something goes wrong.

I'm going to leave this post at this point. This article is the first one I have notated using Otter.ai. As a new feature on my iPhone 8 which is my latest phone where I can do a triple tap on the back of my phone and it activates an audio app and I've chosen otter so that it's transcribing, so I will be going to check that, copying the text out and putting it into my blog.

And then my blog will get posted. Currently it's still going out on TypePad, but I'm looking to maybe transfer that to pistachio, which I really love. It's a blogging platform that uses Evernote as its content management point.

And then of course I've got a new website that is work in progress that may be coming out through WordPress, that's a completely different mindset of whether I want to go down the WordPress rabbit hole. The End.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Inviting you to a Social Media Spring Clean

You conceive the workshop, plan the workshop, secure a venue including connectivity for remote access, your settle on dates then its time to get the word out. The fear is always... and I mean always... What if no one comes? The reason these kinds of workshops get planned is that the word on the street, everyone you meet  seems to confirm that if you ran a workshop about this [insert conversation topic where pearls of wisdom although obvious to you really light up the face to the recipient] it would be well-received coz everyone want this knowledge.  From experience, this is not as easy as it seems when in the heat of that revelation of an idea for a workshop when mid conversation!  

Embed Responsively

Illustration by Kevin Cornell

Anybody associated with the arena of web design even on the periphery as I am has heard about responsive design. The concept of designing a single web site that adapts (responds) to the devise it is being displayed upon. A time was that it was by analysing the stats of your visitors you could predict the most likely size of monitor and resolution being required and provide a selection of sites sized accordingly along with a client side query to determine the size expected and deliver pages in response to the query. Then there came mobile! At least that's how I understood it in my limited experience. I was down the rabbit hole! It was at this time I became aware of reciprocity, propinquity and normalisation. Coding a design could be rigidly and inflexibly set in tables with sliced up graphic elements with hotspots and links. These would 'explode' and 'break' displaying in what seemed like an arbitrary manner depending on your favoured browser. The separation of code and style enabled consistency and including a set of instructions to overwrite different browser margin defaults helped. The Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). I was an advocate for responsive as soon as it became a thing. I expect these 'zero default' style sheet addenda still exist and form the basis of secret design formulae many pure coders still closely guard. Its tricky to achieve... or things might have changed.

Web presence and the ability to create one was the objective of my web building education and as each element of building web sites became specialisms in their own right html, xhtml, CSS, asp, php, xml, javascript - these became distinct from the visual front interface which in turn developed its own special branches UDI (User Designed Interface), UXI (User Experience Interface) until being a master of all was an impossibility and engaging a professional was beyond the cost effectiveness of my needs, I turned to the very thing I loathed when I first begun my education. BYO (Build Your Own), drop and drag applications evolved into a necessary evil.

I remember the first drop and drag experiences within browser environments afforded by javascript and flash. The move away from passive unmovable pages with form fields the only interaction was the introduction of user experience integration. Whether that equated to 'engagement' is contentious, still being discussed. I could indeed go on but this post is Embed Responsively.

Many blogging platforms and BYO are now to a greater or lesser extent 'responsive' to varying degrees of success. It is an art. The transition through absolute and relative positioning to fully responsive adaptive web pages has been aesthetically essential to the seamless, cross platform, multi device user experience.

Returning the premise of this post ...web presence and the ability to create one being the objective of my web building education... left me forever needing to learn something new to keep up to date! I just want to gather resources and information for inclusion in one space with a link to share. Simple as! But...

Although BYO and Blogging platforms (the ones I use currently) offer responsive templates and elements, the media I gather from around the web and the media I create and upload are embedded using html code snippets, podcasts from Audioboom, audio interviews stored on Soundcloud, videos and playlists on YouTube, PDF documents published on ISSUU, presentation slide decks on Slideshare or Photo galleries from Flickr or Instagram they are traditionally fixed in size (height and width). 

Yes I'm getting to the point!

The straight copy and paste of these html embed snippets don't adapt to a responsive environment. I was overjoyed when I was introduced to embedresponsively.com - "It helps build responsive embed codes for embedding rich third-party media into responsive web pages." It was created and is maintained by @jeffehobbs based on research and work by Theirry Koblentz, Anders Andersen and Niklaus Gerber.

I love it, I wanted to share it - here it is! embedresponsively.com

Mapping the social media landscape for 2011: infographic | Econsultancy

I love info-graphics. This one caught my eye with its progressive stats which reflect my own social dilemma. As social media platforms integrate, the connection with an audience is made easier. Building the audience with consistency is as real as ever and not directly digital but the social media mechanics evolve in our digital lives for both personal and professional activity. Combined with public and private implications 2012 will be an intersting year.

Some of the most interesting highlights are below. Here, Dream Systems Media presents the must-know numbers from the biggest and best networks, based on AdAge data.

• Auto-posting to Facebook decreases likes and comments by 70%
• B2C Facebook results go up by 30% on Sundays
• 34% of marketers have generated leads using Twitter and 20% have closed deals using Twitter
• 55% of people access Twitter via their mobiles
• 40% of bloggers consider themselves professionals
• 20% of searched on Google each day have never been made before
• 56% of college students said that if they were offered a job by a company that banned social media use, they’d turn it down

see the infographic for full details:

via econsultancy.com

 

Im With Phil... getting to Phil Campbell

Do startups need to hire social media experts? - Social Media

"I’m not going to talk about why startups should utilize social media and all that other basic stuff. Instead, I’ll focus more on the bottom line aspect of finding out what their purposes and agendas for using social media are, which is a prerequisite before even thinking of hiring a social media expert."

via thenextweb.com

I am very interested in the emerging attitudes to social media 'bringing in the best to be the best'.

Every 'Start Up' should include a social media 'expert' in the executive team or someone who knows someone who does and can bring them on board. You shouldn't 'hire', you should look to them to ignite a social media following from the start. The power of social networks is the following network connections. You have to have a social heart before being a social media 'expert' we make projects fly.

I'm uncomfortable with the term 'expert' when referring to social media, being good at social media is being a good communicator through the medium of digital.

The way I see it - part 2

Industry blogging, as a practitoner of social media it all gets a bit kalidascopic, inward looking.

I read about products, tools, services, platforms, people talking about those products, tools etc. Its the people talking about people I'm missing. I am not getting enough people stories, I'm interesting in personal practice. How do you used technology. When did technology stop being a tool to mastered but an entity to be absorbed? 'I know kunfoo' We know this brain dump matrix programimg of the brain is film fiction territory, But when did technology or items designated tech ie computers, games, phones enter your conscience and how did you assimilate that in to your world?

I found a photo recently of a time when 'tech' was not in my consciousness. I had an electric typewriter with floppy disc storage, the plastic square kind any how. Even then 'floppy 'disc' was a legacy word for a media type. There was Viynl, tape cassette, CD compact disc, dat tapes, minidisc and in the early 90's I still operated reel to reel tape! One thing in common, they are all storage mediums.

My working life was since graduation in 1994 with a degree in Theatre, Design & Technology, full off Technology it wasn't realy thought off as tech'nology' it was technical equipment. When did that spark ignite, when was the alchemical moment when the technical equipment became tech 'nology'? Is it connected with awe?

Was it when everything became computerised? Was when switches stopped being flicked, perhaps? Button pressing, fade sliders, the triggering of a direct mechanical response or verbal actions. Noting has changed cues are stil being acted upon.

Now a computer button is so removed from the action ultimately executed metaphysically is wide, yet the digital process is tiny, so fast but for some reason that matters to me, to my brain. As a multi-tasker I think I have processing power envy!

The way I see it - part 1

l find blogging a frustrating experience.

It's a transfer mechanisms, a cross posting method. Getting the content out of my thought buffer / memory cache on to / in to a blog post in text form hurts my head.

I like my notebooks. I like writing.

Here is why.

When I type I have to think of the keys I hit, the letters, line forms, the symbols that placed together form words, those words are the code that when interpreted by you the reader will decode, translate in your brain as a representation of the content, my idea that I encoded in to the text based storage media.

The stored media becomes a collective archive. We can all reference the same meterial. How do we translate / decode the data and store / remember stuff? That cross reference with previous archived material dictates the knowledge and recall quality.

Now that was a revelation to me and fingers crossed, it is a pivotal moment for my social media practice. I don't want to struggle to express myself. It's a frustration experienced by many dyslexics.

I use Livescribe. This post was written in a digitally enabled notebook using a computerised pen. The written text was uploaded to my Mac and passed through a convert to text programme providing me with the editable text that formed the foundation of this blog post.

Livescribe is stationary when did technology depart from being stationary and office supplies in the sense of work tools?

The way my mind works the awareness of the barrier between thought and expression has to be encoded by me. Pen to paper is a form of hand coding, freeform lines and swirls revealing as the pen passes across the page like a printer head. Thoughts to expression at the tip and flip of a pen. It doesn't exhaust me.

 

Mist, Rain, Zebra Print, Sharp Light,

Unfiltered reality?

How do your notate your world for recall?

How do you share it with others?