In recent history I stopped posting on most social media and moved to the fediverse. I still browse the social platforms to keep up with trends and friends, but I only post on my private IG and here.
What I share here is separate from but related to my professional life — I’m thinking out loud and making room for rough, unfinished ideas. I write mainly for myself, but if others find it useful, that’s great. The practice of reading and reflecting makes your thinking stick, and I am from a certain time and place, so this is how I approach learning and communicating about what I’m learning. It’s a habit.
While this is my preferred approach, I acknowledge that sharing unfinished ideas publicly is risky and you have to accept accountability for the messiness that comes with that. But I also know that working through your vulnerability through the act of writing lets you tap into your most creative, innovative self and test your ideas against an evolving sense of what’s good. The potential for an audience, however real or implied, keeps you more honest and less self-indulgent. Despite the trade offs, I think it’s worthwhile.
As I add to this page, I’ll be thinking out loud about digital rhetoric and communication alongside emerging technology, and linking back to foundational ideas I see reflected online today. Occasionally I’ll say something longer.
Gap capitalized on the Sidney Sweeney “good genes” controversy by doing this collab with Katseye, the global pop group where each member is a different nationality. Each member of the pop group dances through in black and brown jeans.
The internet says Joann fabrics is going to declare bankruptcy, putting a huge market of individual crafters without access to in-person retail craft spaces into a tailspin. It’s likely they will ask their creditors to restructure their debt, making them able to keep some stores open. The whole market relies heavily on in-person shopping (it’s a textural and sensory shopping experience, which is the point!) and hasn’t pivoted well to e-commerce.
This is one of my favorite pet subjects. Globally, the arts and crafts market overwhelmingly caters to women and children and it’s HUGE, commanding a very dedicated and loyal customer base. And still, it struggles.
Despite an influx of crafters during the shutdown, retail craft stores have struggled to strike a balance between sustainable e-commerce and in-person retail strategies. Other issues: For months after the pandemic, the Joann’s in my neighborhood struggled to keep the place stocked and staffed, exacerbated by skyrocketing shipping costs and shifts in the retail worker market after the shutdowns. Kids went back to school, cooling the market for arts and crafts activities on which to spend their time. And with lagging incomes and cost of living increases eating into people’s spending money, customers just don’t have the bandwidth they may be used to.
In my experience, customers don’t love shopping at a Michaels or a Joann’s, but they appreciate the ability to get what they need, mostly on demand, and to do so in-person where you can handle the materials before you buy them. Fiber arts people, for example, put a lot of importance on the weight, texture and color of their tools and materials - and for good reason! Pleasant tools make for a pleasant experience - and for pleasant outcomes. Indie retailers corner this market by keeping inventory low, building relationships with customers, creating affinity using social media marketing and by nurturing community with digital learning and forums. Crafters from around the world can share tricks, tools, patterns and finished items with like-minded people. The large-scale retailers can’t compete with that and haven’t really tried.
It’s unclear what’s next, but I’m thinking of all the people who live in places that can’t sustain a standalone fabric or yarn store. Rural makers can sometimes find tools and materials in resale markets like Facebook Marketplace, and sometimes you can find decent stuff at the local flea, or at specialty shop, such as a small machine repair shop that works on sewing machines. A lot of those folks won’t have a store to go to, and will have to travel to shop in person or resort to online retailers that don’t meet their needs.
I’ve been waiting for this one because it’s a story I know well. It is an impeccably reported book covering how young women navigated a compromised, stigmatized, coercive landscape around unplanned pregnancies in the late 20th century. Sisson is a comprehensive writer whose reporting is deeply empathetic, based on her personal experience as an activist and academic working in reproductive justice alongside extensive research. She discusses the history of the adoption movement at length, connecting it to other institutional family separation movements, and considers it alongside the choice to abort unplanned pregnancies and against the decision to parent anyway, often in a deeply compromised social and political climate.
My deep appreciation to her for telling these stories and telling them well.
Currently reading: Relinquished by Gretchen Sisson 📚
Despite being from Indiana, I feel like I’ve heard very little about this book, which covers the rise of the Indiana KKK in the early 1900s. The book’s central story revolves around the Grand Dragon, a bad man whose bad acts finally land him in enough trouble that the powers that be couldn’t ignore his non-KKK activities any longer. The point, however, is that they ignored most of his activities because institutional power was both in the Klan’s pocket and was leveraged to recruit members up and down the state. Egan takes a powerful, uncomfortable look at how the KKK organized white, Protestant people against everyone else using social and professional organizations and churches, and how they helped shape neighborhood vigilantes into police forces tasked with protecting property and morality.
Fellow Hoosiers will recognize a lot of familiar names, towns and players. That photo in the NYT book review was taken in Marion, Indiana, for example. I’m finishing up an anecdote that takes place in Logansport. New Castle, Muncie, Ft. Wayne, Terre Haute are also places of interest. A reader on Twitter reminded me that the KKK tried to purchase Valaparaiso University, once one of the most prestigious private universities this side of the Mississippi. Examples abound. It’s unsurprising to read that Indianapolis was nearly taken over by the Klan in the 1920s, considering how many in the statehouse openly endorse exclusionary opinions today.
Come for the juicy tell-all, stay for the damning details on how Britney’s abusive father, codependent mother and opportunist sister ensnared one of the world’s biggest stars into an abusive conservatorship, and consider at length why we ask young starlets to run through these gauntlets in exchange for our attention. It’s neither the complete portrait of the artist nor the feminist manifesto I wish it was, but I came away from it with more empathy and respect for her and what horrors she’s weathered.
As a professional poster (derogatory), this is exactly the kind of posting stream I’m interested in supporting for institutional communications. When you speak on behalf of a company or institution, you need the power to own your own platforms and content, the agility of posting to multiple channels from one platform/location, and it needs to be user friendly. We need support and ease of use, and since I’m also in public education, it would be great if we could do some of that for free or close to it.
I’m here after listening to this podcast yesterday, after a months-long conversation about abandoning social media in my department (https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/23/23928550/posse-posting-activitypub-standard-twitter-tumblr-mastodon). With the move to algorithmic CPC taking priority over newsworthiness across most platforms, we saw a major drop in engagement. That was after the ridiculous “pivot to video” disaster, though departments like mine nonetheless consider video production in a real way every few months. We decided to call it after Twitter, the final app that answered our need for just-in-time communication, decided to become a walled garden with bad SEO. We’re going to let those channels go dark and focus on talking to our stakeholders in more effective ways.
I’ve been playing with Bluesky and Mastodon on my own, and in many ways, this micro.blog communication channel fits what we need. It doesn’t hurt that I like an indie model with a friendly vibe (micro.blog functionality reminds me a little of early self-hosted blogging and this site feels a little like early Tumblr). The problem: our audiences are not here. We still need to be able to post to myriad platforms, including the big baddies that we’d rather ignore.
