I have been reading a lot of Phil Agre this month. A friend recommended Agre's writings to me, and when my new e-ink gadget arrived, I made a dedicated folder with all the writings on his home page. It's been great.
Here is one quote that has made me think quite a bit: "In order to have a public voice, you have to care about something. So figure out what you care about."
Oof!
And he doesn't stop there: "It's not just being against something, and it's not just wanting to have a community. It means having values that make the world make sense."
Double oof! By the way, this is from his piece, "Find Your Voice."
Agre describes a public voice as in between a private voice and a commercial voice. A private voice only prioritizes honesty -- it's just for one's self. The posts here on my website lean towards a private voice, although I've found that the simple act of making a piece discoverable online helps me write (and think) more clearly.
Then there's the commercial voice, which has a "predetermined effect on the audience." A commercial voice tells the audience to do something, but in a way that the audience wants to hear. "Follow this account!" "Buy this book!" "Delete this app!" "Sign this petition!"
One alternative to the private voice and the commercial voice is the public voice. I've been thinking a lot about this concept of a public voice, particularly after a weird experience with posting recently.
I do not make any commission money on my book. I still feel some obligation to promote it, so I put together a series of posts and started dolling them out on Instagram and TikTok. I have over 8,000 followers on TikTok (🤪) from a brief stint of videos I posted during the 2020 pandemic lock-down. Something about being home all day every day allowed me to engage quite differently. I digress...
Anyway, despite those 8,000 followers, my book promo posts have about 150 views each on TikTok. LinkedIn claims my post has over 3,300 views. My Instagram posts also seem to be averaging about 150 views, although my initial announcement did a little better.
I have to remind myself, this is not what I actually care about!
For transparency, audience metrics are alluring. Very alluring. Seductive, even. Maybe it's just the thrill of seeing numbers go up (at SIGCSE this year, someone presented results by saying "the number goes up, so, yay" and I had to contain my laughter). Or maybe our brains have been tricked to receive those numbers as a social signal of some kind.
This creates a kind of dilemma: "You must be extremely online to build an audience, but you must be extremely offline to actually have a thought worth sharing." It is also a dilemma "between visibility and depth... work must be formed in private conviction first, otherwise the demand for attention reshapes it before it knows what it is."
Side note - I came across this post via Taylor Lorenz on Instagram, who shared a screenshot of a tweet, and the tweet had an attached screenshot of the substack post. Truly it has been said unto you, the internet has degraded into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four."
So, back to what I care about. Well, for the book promo posts I have been working on, I am curating vector graphics of 50 or so different mobile devices -- iPhones, iPods, iPads, and some Android devices as well. I always found it fascinating that a few engineers could add a button or change a screen resolution, and then millions of people would deal with that decision every day. I vividly remember following "antennagate" when I was in high school.
When placed in the Instagram grid, the graphics for the iPhone 4, the first-generation iPod touch, and the iPhone 5 all look pretty similar. Instagram shrinks them. It's just another post.
Although I am not an Instagram guru, I know enough about the app to realize that this series of posts will not "do well." They look similar and they contain a similar message ("this app sucks").
What I care about, here and elsewhere, is that the posts are actually quite different. The iPhone 4 was quite different from the iPhone 5! Apple stretched the screen from 960 rows of pixels to 1,136! Apple switched from the 30-pin iPod-style connector to the reversible "lightning" connector! The details...
From what I can tell, apps like Instagram and TikTok do not really care about details, which may be due to the fragmentation in these systems. By designing the feed around individual posts, each post is forced to be its own self-contained story. There is no way to know what kind of post will show up next. There is no way to know what kind of audience will see what you post. It all collapses into the vortex of the feed. If you want to know more about context collapse, time collapse, and relevance collapse, well, my book goes into more detail.
Perhaps this does not answer the titular question, and perhaps it does. It is tempting to make a list of "what I care about," however this does not seem like the kind of inquiry to answer in a list. If I was really forced to choose a single word, I think it would be democracy. If I were forced to choose a single phrase, it would be "the details of democracy," because I mean democracy in a deep and detailed sense: the day-to-day challenges of attempting self-governance and self-determination within a social system designed hundreds of years ago. Our democracy, if we are still willing to call it that, has yet to contend with the realities of the 21st-century. I am especially concerned about a handful of big tech companies managing what we see for several hours every day. That is one attempt at stating what I care about.