Reading “Insecure”

For future reference, some notes on a very insightful article by Laura Kalbag.

Laura writes a post titled “Insecure” about confidence in today’s Web and the lack thereof, and it’s well worth reading [1]. I’m aggregating the notes I took on Mastodon here, because I want to come back to them at some point and timelines don’t make good archiving tools.

It is not any of our faults that we have become addicted or obsessed with browsing and posting to social media when these interfaces are specifically designed to addict (engage!) and manipulate (call-to-action!) us.

(Side note: I feel strange about Mastodon because I’ve become addicted and I’m pretty sure it was not the idea. So maybe —surely, even— I also have an addiction tendency that I have to fix.)

I don’t have anything particularly egregious or thrilling to hide from public view, but I want to have control over what I choose to share (y’know, this is a good definition of privacy…)

I like this way of presenting privacy. It’s not hiding things that are personal, it’s choosing what you want to share.

I’ve lost confidence in the web I want to share things on, and I’ve lost confidence in those things I want to share.

Thank you Laura for articulating this.

Karl Dubost for instance always made me think he somehow “masters” his online presence [2], but it comes at a great cost of effort and secrecy, I think. And we don’t really want to hide, we just want to be confident when we share (the other way around, thus).

Part of this is convincing myself that I have something worthwhile to say again. That sharing something cool or posting the odd thought doesn’t mean I’m arrogant and think the world needs to hear me. I’m just craving connection over shared experiences.

(For the record, Laura, you have a lot of worthwhile things to say.)

Here’s what I do:

  • post relevant, pro things on Mastodon,
  • joke like there’s no tomorrow on Mastodon (other, more discreet account),
  • blog “for myself”, as I have decided that my place is my place (duh!) and if someone likes it, good; if they don’t, they just have to not read me.

I find connections still work (here on Mastodon with politically-enlightened people who like their fun; on Twitter with colleagues; on my blog with people who like to take the time to blog about –well, anything).

I’m still a bit worried that my Twitter and Mastodon accounts point to the same personal website, but for the moment I still feel it’s safe to do that.

Case in point: The value of networking tools. 25 visitors since Tuesday, but a good place to track my thoughts of the moment. Lucky if someone adds to it, happy to be able to write (I like to write for the sake of writing), useful if someone asks “what do you think of” and not being taken by surprise. 🙂

99% of the RSS feeds recommended to me were of white men.

Yes, another problem, this one. I’ve pushed female co-workers to blog (not all white, moreover). One of them posted two articles to Medium (although I warned her about the non-perennial frailty of it), the other is stuck on Instagram, every other week saying “I should get a blog”. By all means, yes!

Footnotes

[1Also, it allowed me to use “the lack thereof”, which is a feat in itself.

[2Karl left Flickr and Twitter before most of us understood all the stakes, for example.

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