Communications

A Year Away from Twitter / X

June 26, 2024 By Glynn Young 5 Comments

Twitter was the first social media platform I joined, way back in 2008. I was far from being an early adopter, but I was one of the first people at work to sign up.

Even that early, you could see the enormous potential for good and bad that a social media platform like Twitter could have. What we know as cancel culture developed early.

From 2008 to 2023, I had a consistent strategy in how I used the platform. I tweeted positive stuff. I didn’t engage in politics or controversies. I highlighted good things people were doing or writing. And I have to say I was steadfast from the beginning to the end.

At one point, Twitter changed its algorithm, and I discovered my account had been suspended, caught up in some automatic change (I wasn’t alone). But I had a friend who had a friend who knew someone who was a developer at Twitter, and within about two days, my account had been restored. The suspension had been a mistake by the design of a heavy-handed algorithmic change.

That was then. Elon Musk eventually bought Twitter and fired a whole bunch of people. If your account got suspended, you were going to have to deal with algorithmic bots, and a bot is never wrong.

I was continuing on my merry way, when, on June 12 of last year, I discovered my account had been suspended. I appealed. Several times, in fact. The length of the reviews of my appeals could be measured in nanoseconds. My remaining option was to write a letter to Twitter / X headquarters in San Francisco.

And I said to myself, “No. I’m done. I am not going to waste my time on a letter that will likely be trashed before anyone reads it. I’m done with Twitter.” And I walked away.

I have not regretted my decision. Not at all.

Here’s what has happened because of that.

I have more free time. Like up to 90 minutes a day.

The craziness that the platform has always embraced is gone, leading to a quieter life.

I began to add links daily to my blog for interesting articles, stories, and poems that people might like to read.

My time on Facebook and Instagram has decreased as well. I haven’t increased my time on LinkedIn.

I’m writing more. I’m writing better.

Substack has become a more important social platform for me. I don’t have a column or site on Substack, but I follow favorite authors, writers, photographers, and artists, and it’s all positive. Negative stuff can creep in, but I ignore it or unfollow the account.

I also discovered that journalism is still being practiced in the United States, at least on Substack.

I miss the people I regularly communicated with on Twitter, including a lot of poets. Tweetspeak Poetry, the site I write weekly for, was born on Twitter. We hosted numerous poetry slams with the use of Twitter hashtags, but that’s long in the past. You might say Tweetspeak outgrew Twitter, or it grew in a different direction (Tweetspeak is celebrating 15 years this year.)

Overall, the suspension of my Twitter account has been a good thing. I could have created a different account and started over, but I decided it wouldn’t be worth it.

I got some of my life back, and I’m going to keep it.

Top photograph by David Paschke via Unsplash. Used with permission.

How I Came to Social Media

June 19, 2024 By Glynn Young 4 Comments

It was work that originally led me to sign up for Twitter and other social media platforms. For a number of years, social media became my work. Even when I retired, I was still managing the company’s social media platforms.

From 2003 to 2004, I spent nine months working in communications for St. Louis Public Schools, which was in dire straits. Enrollment had declined to an official 40,000 from a peak of about 100,000, and the district was still operating school buildings, a headquarters building, and an administrative staff that supported a 100,000 enrollment. A management firm was hired by a reform school board to take over and do the painful stuff that had to be done. The management firm was in place all of two days when it discovered that the district was bankrupt.

The firm wielded the ax. School buildings were closed. The central administration was slashed to the bone, and even some of the bone was removed. The communications staff was reduced from 13 positions to one half of a person.

I was hired at the tail end of the staff reductions, but more turmoil was ahead. The total communications budget was $20,000 (down from $1 million), and it had been spent by the time I arrived in October. We had a web site in dire need of overhaul. We had constituencies that had to be communicated with. Protests were daily. I wasn’t in my office five minutes when I was informed that the media had gathered, waiting for a statement on the wildcat teacher sickout. (Fifteen minutes after that, I was making a statement in front of the assembled reporters from newspapers, television, and radio.)

We did the only thing we knew to do. We went electronic, including a variety of email newsletters. They were designed carefully and with a lot of forethought. In fact, given how intensely disliked the management firm was, we prominently displayed “Not for External Distribution” at the top of the newsletter for administrative staff and school principals, knowing full well that it would be immediately forwarded to news media, friends, protest groups, and everyone else. It might have been one of the most effective communication tools the district had at the time – the internal newsletter we hoped everyone would leak.

This was the time when I discovered message boards and other kinds of communication tools that were being used by people opposed to what the district was doing (leaking worked both ways).

Totally unrelated to what we were dealing with was a student up at Harvard who was setting up a dating site called Facebook. And a guy born and raised in the St. Louis area was working on a micro-media tool that eventually became Twitter.

I went back to the corporate world which, I discovered, was unaware of the existence of electronic communications outside pre-approved programs blessed by the IT department. I’d been hired specifically to deal with a bankruptcy issue affecting the company, but questions were arising about what people could see was happening online. When our department boss asked at a staff meeting if anyone knew what a blog was, people looked at each and shook their heads. I was more than familiar with what they were because of my experience with the school district. I explained what I knew. I became the immediate in-house expert.

Twitter launched in 2006, and I held off signing up until I could see what implications it might have for the company. In 2008, I signed up, embarking on the wild roller coaster ride that social media had already become. I joined Facebook a week later, and not long after I started my own blog, in addition to one for the company.

Next week: A Year Away from Twitter / X

Top photograph by Sara Kurfeß via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Major Lesson of Five Decades of Writing

April 3, 2024 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Looking back at five decades of writing, I can say with certainty the major lesson I’ve learned. I was reminded of it while I was reading Writing Better Fiction by Harvey Stanbrough. This is about as no-nonsense, straightforward, this-is-how-it-is discussion of writing that I’ve ever come across. And most of it applies to non-fiction as well as fiction.

In other words, I recognize what he talks about. Fully recognize it.

The major lesson: Writers write, no matter what.

You may be sick. You may have 67 other priorities and pressing demands. You may stare dully at a blank page or screen without having a single thing to put down. You may hear the chorus of constant critics, including your own internal voices. You may watch others write something seemingly effortlessly and wonder why that never happens to you. Twice a day might be tempted to pack it all in and walk away, forever.

But it still comes down to this: writers write, no matter what.

I’d like to say it gets easier, and it does, in a sense. Like anything else, the more practiced you become, the better you get at it. What’s different about writing is that every article, every story, every poem, every novel, and every book is its own singular act of creation. Which means that, each time you write, you’re doing something altogether new.

I learned this lesson early, without realizing it. I was a reporter for my college newspaper, and I had a fair number of stories already under my belt, the result of a semester and a half of reporting. The story was the University Court deciding whether a candidate for student body president had violated the election rules. The session, held a few days before the election in a room in the student union, went late into the night. The editors were (impatiently) waiting for the story; they wanted to go home. It was a big story; the candidate was the favored winner.

The comment session ended; the court retired into deliberation. It was getting close to midnight. I found a pay phone nearby (no mobile phones in those days) and called the editor who said she hoped I had most of the story already written (this would have been by hand; no laptops in those days). The court returned and announced a non-decision. The candidate was outraged and demanded a yes-or-no answer. Back into deliberation they went.

*LSU’s newspaper some 13 years before my time*

I sat in a chair in the meeting room, writing the story by hand. I guessed what they outcome was going to be, because it was clear that the candidate had indeed violated the rules. And then we all waited. For an hour. I kept tinkering and editing the story, knowing my editors were going nuts, because I still had to type the thing.

Right at 12:30 a.m., the court read its decision. I’d guessed right. I waited just a moment for the explosion from the candidate (now former candidate) and then ran (I did not walk) the roughly three blocks to the Journalism building. I shouted the decision at the editor and sat down to type like a crazy person. I’d type two paragraphs, and she’d grab the page from the typewriter as I typed the next two paragraphs.

Somehow a coherent story emerged. Nobody said thanks, or good job, or good story, or anything else. I watched the editing and the finishing of the front-page layout. I was asked to check the headline for accuracy. And then it was rushed off to the back shop six blocks away for typesetting. I also had to indicate what could be cut if space was too tight. I got back to my fraternity house (where I was living) about 2 a.m., only to discover half a dozen people waiting for me to return, because they wanted to know what the outcome had been.

Under horrendous deadline and pressure conditions, the writer wrote.

And it wouldn’t be the last time.

Top photograph by Nik Shuliahin via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Terms of Service” by Chris Martin

February 16, 2022 By Glynn Young 3 Comments

Chris Martin works at Moody Publishers as a content marketing editor and a consultant in social media, marketing, and communications. He has a deep background in social media and digital content strategy. He perhaps best known for his blog, Terms of Service, where he writes thoughtfully and with great insight about topics as diverse as the metaverse, TikTok, Wordle, and the impact of social media on society and culture.

His new book is entitled, appropriately enough, Terms of Service: The Real Cost of Social Media. The book is a primer on social media and the internet but is also more than that – a look at how the internet shapes us and what can we do about it. And his solutions are not “let’s pass a law” type of prescriptions, but instead what individuals can do themselves.

This is not a book that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok will like. But it’s an important book, one that is both deeply thought through and easy to read.

Martin starts at the beginning with how the internet evolved, how it works now, and how it affects our lives. He examines fives ways the social internet shapes us – the belief that attention assigns value, how we trade away our privacy, how affirmation becomes more important than truth, and how we demonize – and then destroy – people we dislike.

His recommendations for dealing with this are particularly helpful, because they are relatively simple things individuals can do. (They may not be easy, particularly if you’re a social media addict, but they are simple and straightforward.) This emphasis on individual actions is far more empowering than waiting for “Congress to pass a law.” As Martin points point, it’s inevitable that governments will start regulating the social internet, but that doesn’t mean we must or should wait. And what we can do as individuals starts with something many readers may find surprising – studying history.

Terms of Service is a highly readable and intelligent look at the social internet, how it shapes our lives, and what we can do to regain control.

Top photograph by Nathan Dumlao via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Bad News” by Batya Ungar-Sargon

February 9, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Batya Ungar-Sargon is the deputy opinion editor at Newsweek and co-hosts Newsweek’s podcast “The Debate.” Before joining Newsweek, she was the opinion editor of Forward, the largest Jewish media outlet in the United States. She’s written for The New York Times and Washington Post. She’s appeared on MSNBC, NPR, and NBC. She has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

She is not the person you would expect to have written a book like Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy. But she did.

Bad News is not a book written from a conservative, right-wing, or alt-right perspective. It’s not a hastily compiled mishmash of everything that’s wrong with the news media. Instead, Ungar-Sargon has published a carefully researched, well-documented, and well-written story of where American news media has gone seriously wrong and how that is harming the United States.

If the problem could be summarized in one sentence, it would be this: the business model of the news media has shifted from reporting the news to giving its demographic the perspective that it wants. Some call this reporting the narrative instead of the news. Whatever it’s called, it’s making a significant contribution, perhaps the most significant, to destroying trust it itself, in American Institutions, and what Americans have believed about their country. And that has implications far beyond the 50 states

This is what Ungar-Sargon documents in Bad News:

The people who are the reporters and editors have not been working-class for two generations. The economic and social status of reporters changed fundamentally, and the author points to the Watergate scandal as one of the starting points.

The major news media have abandoned the working class, not unlike the Democratic Party did beginning with the Clinton Administration. The working class is still large group of people, and Fox News isn’t so much the conservative media outlier as it is the channel that covers what the working class cares about.

Social media and the internet, far from “democratizing” society, have been the mechanisms by which the major news media centered their efforts on narrative instead of news – and turned the narrative into a business model.

The media’s coverage of racial issues fits its audience’s understanding about race and itself, but it is completely out of kilter with what most Americans believe or experience. One example: 81 percent of Black Americans do not want the police defunded. Ungar-Sargon argues that the media is besotted with race because a discussion of class, which she sees is the real issue, would undermine the media’s own position.

The media’s cartoonish coverage of Jews, crime, and Trump voters exemplify what is happening. She doesn’t say it exactly this way, but Donald Trump is like the drug to the news media’s addiction. It needs Trump, and not only to prop up its ratings and subscriptions but also to be the ever-present Bogeyman out to destroy America as the media understands it.

She doesn’t present a laundry list of how to fix the problem; the solution will take generations. But she does suggest things that Americans can do to stop the media from exercising the negative influence it has. And it’s not things like cancel your newspaper subscription.

Bad News is an important book, one likely to be ignored by the news media. But the rest of need to read it and understand it. It’s that important.

When Journalism Began to Change

When the Worldwide Web Was a Marvel – and a Mystery

How Email Started a Revolution

The Media and Kyle Rittenhouse

The U.S. Media and Russian Collusion

Top photograph by Markus Spiske via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Convergence of Social Media and Big Media

January 26, 2022 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

A work colleague in a Latin American country sent an email, asking for help. A manufacturing plant had been proposed, and while most people wanted it, a small number of radical environmentalists did not. There had been protests, road blockades, and rallies. And then, when it appeared that both the company and the authorities were going ahead, the ante was raised.

Using anonymous Twitter accounts, the protestors targeted the company’s spokesman. Scores of people were tweeting. A bounty was placed on the spokesman head — $5000 US was being offered for the spokesman dead or alive. And the tweets included his home address. Stripes were published in the local media.

I was asked to contact Twitter, which I did immediately. Then, as now, Twitter and the other social media giants were difficult to reach. They were, and are, all about communication, except when you needed to communicate with them. The company spokesman and his family went into hiding. Twitter responded two days after being contacted. The tweets, Twitter said, did not violate their community standards and would remain.

Think about that for a moment. A US-based company was allowing its platform to be used to threaten and possibly accomplish violence against an individual.

I should mention this happened in 2014. This continued to be Twitter’s policy until about a year later, when its founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey, received a death threat. On Twitter. Overnight, death threats were deemed violations of community standards. It’s amazing how that works.

In a very short period of time, roughly five or six years, social media had gone from the “great democratic experiment to give power to everyone” to something darker, more threatening, and more dangerous. The first few years had been something almost euphoric; very few people today would say anything about social media is euphoric. We’ve seen its ugly side, and we’ve seen it over and over again. Today it’s called cancel culture.

But it’s more insidious that people ganging up on someone online. What is worrisome is that it’s becoming embedded as policy with the social media giants. The concern, usually expressed by conservatives, is that a progressive / leftist mentality guides the social media platforms when they determine what’s true, what’s false, what is “missing context,” and what’s “fake news.” The Wall Street Journal took a look and determined that left-wing factcheckers were controlling the discussion on the COVID-19 pandemic. A lawsuit by conservative journalist against Facebook brought forth a really curious statement in Facebook’s court filings – that its factchecking was nothing more than opinion. I wouldn’t call that the best defense.

In general, Big Media is comfortable with the factchecking done by the social media platforms. That’s no surprise if Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others are aligned with your own narrative and view of the world.

Consider what happened with the Covington Kids in January 2019. The power of big media and social media converged to destroy a bunch of teenaged boys whom they believed epitomized the prevailing media narrative. As The Atlantic pointed out, the media botched the story, and the damage to their credibility has been lasting. Not to mention costly. On that Friday and Saturday, I sat horrified while I watched online friends on Facebook and Twitter hysterically embrace the role of lynch mob.

Social media are powerful and influential. According to Pew Research, more than half of the people on Twitter get their news from that platform. For Facebook, the number has been declining to slightly less than a third. My own experience has been to stop considering Twitter as a source for hard or political news and discount most of what I see labeled as news on Facebook. I follow virtually no news accounts on Instagram or MeWe.

We have to learn how to assert, or reassert, some control over what is called news.

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