I think we can all agree by now that “social media” is a mess. Whether I am referring to Facebook or Twitter or any of the others, these apps have become in large part a cesspool of misinformed and misdirected anger at some part of the world that is perceived to be unfair to the poster. And the algorithm is designed to hook you in and keep you there. And sell you stuff. Using data that you probably wish they did not have. It has become, in short, the polar opposite of the utopian goal that we heard so much about as the internet was first spreading around the globe. It has divided us more than brought us together. And this is partly the doing of the engagement algorithm but also the toxic danger of anonymity (or at least distance), which seems to bring out the worst in people. And there are those who use the algorithm to hook people into a rage vortex and sell them things there. There is a special place in hell for those people.
One of the other problems of course has been that so much social discourse has been reduced to short, pithy, meme-laden shorthand for complex stories and emotions. It is easy and quick, but mostly empty calories. We all swim in this muck every day, but we know we need to slow down and read deeply. It has sucked us all into the vortex at times - go ahead, you can admit it (I am) - and wasted countless precious moments of our lives on relative trivialities.
Newsletters originated as marketing tools. If you had a product, you obviously want to sell that product to people. But even better is when you can build and maintain a relationship with your customers, because the best source of new customers is old customers, particularly when you have built trust with them. Newsletters helped with that - a lot - and still does. A lot. It seems like once a year I have to go on an unsubscribe binge to get away from the product-related email newsletters that clog my personal email box. This is particularly true after some online holiday shopping has - voluntarily or involuntarily - caused my subscriptions to double. Early January is a good time to do this unsubscribing, I have found. The marketing newsletter can contain things we want to know, but they are ultimately marketing tools, and thus not very interesting.
But newsletters are increasingly being used in a really interesting way - for long form writing. Yes, this is not new - I have subscribed to a writer who writes about writing for at least four years, maybe longer. He is a former editor at a large publishing house, and brings that editing perspective to the creative process of writing. Once per week, in a thought provoking way. I enjoy it, and it makes me think.
About a year ago, I started hearing about a new-ish platform for people who want to write and publish newsletters, called Substack. There are several such platforms, such as TinyLetter, Ghost, and Mailchimp. They all have different cost structures, but Substack does two things right: 1) the tools to support your writing and management of the newsletter are well designed, and 2) it is free unless you want to charge for your newsletter, and then they take 10% of whatever you decide to charge. Simple, clear. Easy to use.
The founders of Substack are transparent about what they are trying to do:
In short, they are trying to save the Internet. To wean us away from the advertising and algorithm driven models of social media, and encourage us to move towards reader supported (i.e. paid for by each reader) long - or at least longer - form writing. The idea is you subscribe to those writers who you trust, and who are writing about things you are interested in, or want to know more about. Over time (or sometimes right away) you pay for it, and thus support this sort of more considered, thoughtful, nuanced, writing than social media has ever given us (or likely ever will, since they are so invested in the damaging model they created).
So what does this mean for the future? Will social media just continue to circle the drain and take us with it? My prediction is that over time, Facebook, Twitter, et al. will gradually become less relevant. Cesspools that are recognized as cesspools, and avoided in significant numbers. And we will learn more from newsletters that we have selected, and even paid for, from people we trust. Not algorithms.
Just a suggestion, but you might just want to delete some of those marketing newsletters, and curate a set of newsletters you actually want to read. Which I hope includes this one. Please add a comment with your favorite newsletters to read!
Quote of the Month
From Marshall McLuhan comes this incredibly on point quote:
Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.