Excursions

A tray of fresh breakfast served by my daughter’s imagination.

I had recently expressed my hope for more people to own their identities online.

There is nothing wrong with attempting to control what you post online, to make sure it stays online till you want it to. I do also realise that it is naive to think no one getting online will find this process irksome. Even though well defined, the (open web) principles are not for all. The simplicity of using and posting on social media services will continue to attract regular users. However, here’s wishing that at least a part of these users are inspired to get their own personal domain.

An innate wish there is that more people would leave the silos behind and get online as themselves, express thoughts that are their own, not mindless reposts and shares, and at the site they control - their blogs¹. At the same time, the hope is the hosting platforms make it simpler to book such places online and get them up and running easily.

I think there has already been a huge improvement on this front. There are numerous platforms, like Wordpress, Ghost and others², that are making it simpler to get your own blogs up and running. They also allow you to link these blogs to your domain without fussing over hosting/maintenance. The promise is simple. Jump in with a free tier — if you are happy and if you want to, just switch to a paid account.

But then comes the million dollars question? What’s the point if what I write reaches no one? If no one reads it or talks about it? If everyone keeps shouting in the void without anyone listening, one better not spend the energy. After all, we are sociable. We like interactions, we want feedback.

RSS is a powerful protocol that could have solved this problem. Unfortunately, that’s what it remained, a protocol³. It needed a system to be built on top to gain any traction amongst masses. That’s where I believe lies an opportunity for Micro.blog. It brings in that social layer to the thoughts you pen on your blog.

You can either host your content there or get your posts from existing blog to the micro.blog timeline. You write on your blog, it’s visible for others on their timeline, just as a tweet or a Facebook post will on their respective siloed timelines.

But it doesn’t allow repost. It does not glorify numbers of likes and comments and followers.

Such behaviours and numbers are the signals for bots to game the machine curation systems. Tristan Harris put this very well during one of his podcasts appearances.

Outrage just spreads faster than something that’s not outrage.

When you open up the blue Facebook icon, you’re activating the AI, which tries to figure out the perfect thing it can show you that’ll engage you. It doesn’t have any intelligence, except figuring out what gets the most clicks. The outrage stuff gets the most clicks, so it puts that at the top.

So what do we do then? As Don MacDonald pondered in one of his posts, is sharing a problem? Shall we just stop sharing?

I doubt that will be effective. It will work when we make it work. We need to take control of what gets presented to us to consume. It cannot be done by a corporate inclined primarily first to maximise its margins. It cannot be done by an algorithm that’s designed to gallop every signal and spit a feed to maximise engagement.

Once we start consuming, reading, healthy, we will think healthy. And we should think. And share, and respond we should. Let’s just make sure it is a space that represents us. A space that one can point to and say that’s my thoughts in there. My social presence, a signature. Let open web be that space.

Watched Spider-Man: Homecoming again. I just love every film in MCU. Superhero films are supposed to be fun, not some dark societal commentary.

And Spider-Man finally gets a perfect film — one that lets him be a learning bumbling powerful goodhearted teen.

I guess the attempt from Apple to market HomePod as a speaker-first-smart-later device didn’t work. All I see is people complaining about how Siri sucks. May be it’s the tech community that is vocal in their dislikes at this point.

But anyway days ahead for HomePod look stormy.

Greens at home make a tiresome day just a tad more soothing.

“Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small.”

Few truer words have been spoken on parenting than this. And who else than Backman to pen them.

This is such a feel-good post to cheer one up on how a town in Somerset realised the ill effects of loneliness, isolation had and combated the perceived causes head-on.

The Compassionate Frome project was launched in 2013 by Helen Kingston, a GP there. She kept encountering patients who seemed defeated by the medicalisation of their lives: treated as if they were a cluster of symptoms rather than a human being who happened to have health problems. Staff at her practice were stressed and dejected by what she calls “silo working”.

So, with the help of the NHS group Health Connections Mendip and the town council, her practice set up a directory of agencies and community groups.

Of course, the effects were obvious, there to be seen for all.

Helen Kingston reports that patients who once asked, “What are you going to do about my problem?” now tell her, “This is what I’m thinking of doing next.” They are, in other words, no longer a set of symptoms, but people with agency.

This really made me stop and ponder on where we, as community, have reached. I remember way early in my schooling days I was taught that human is a social animal. Slowly amidst the hustle of the life, driven may be by an overly cynical narrative floating all-around, the definition of being social has completely changed.

I remember when I was living with my parents, we used to plan visits to all our friends and relatives when they were not doing well. I used to question then why should you add misery to their already miserable state by being there and making them host guests. My grandfather had explained once, “They are down, and they need people around them to lift them up — more mentally than physically. Hospitals are only paid to take care of the later. It’s the former that is equally necessary and effective.”

I feel we are being deliberately obtuse to not understand that a dull, shallow “get well soon” message rarely affects. Agree, it may lend a moment of tickle. But it is the social contact that has a chance to heal one completely, not a social message.

I wish the full screen mode on Safari did what I want it to do — go full screen on the article. No address bar, no Favorites bar; just go full screen. iPad does it perfectly. Wish Mac took the inspiration.

I get a physical newspaper delivered to me every morning. My morning cup of tea with a daily dose of news, ones not worthy to go viral has been a routine for me.

However, recently the pages are full of cynicism. I do not want to start my day with this crap.

Stairs to serenity, an opportunity to rise above the routine hustle and bustle.