Unmuzzled: Let The Barking Begin

The week of muzzling the blog to spend time commenting on other blogs is over. Did anyone notice? I’m not sure I did.

No suggestions for more blogs to read came in, but I had a good enough supply from my RSS feeds spotting posts in Mastodon and plucking a few from the Reclaim Hosting Discord blog posts aggregator. Ballpark estimate was maybe 15 comments. I thought I would be clever and leave a beacon in my comments, I added to them all the cryptic #CogDogPbzzragOybttvat2025 (run that through ROT13).

No grand conclusions.

Some great inspirations in reading were Cory Doctorow’s fith Birthday for his Pluralistic machine. Yet a ket segment stayed with me:

I periodically check in with my reader to see what stories have been posted. The experience of choosing to look at the news is profoundly different from having the news blasted at you. I still don’t always choose wisely – I’m as guilty of scrolling my phone when I could be doing something more ultimately satisfying as anyone else – but the affect of being in charge of when and how I consume current events is the opposite of the feeling of being at the beck-and-call of any fool headline writer who hits “publish.”

Deeplink to it.

He goes to that point of aiming to more than just gleefully boost/repost:

Reposting with a comment? Even better – you’re telling people why to pay attention to that thing, or, more importantly, why they can safely ignore it if it’s not their thing (what Bruce Sterling memorably calls an “attention conservation notice”).

When someone you follow – a person – posts or boosts something into their feed, there is a human intention. It is a communicative act. It can be very communicative, even if it’s just a boost, provided the person adds some context with their own commentary or quoting. It can be just a little communicative, too – a momentary thumbpress on the boost button. But either way, to read a feed populated by people, rather than machines, is to be showered with the communicative intent of people whom you have chosen to hear from. Perhaps you chose unwisely and followed someone whose communications are banal or offensive or repetitious. Unfollow them.

deeplinkit

And this is something my brain has been chewing on, as this mostly massive slide of actions to be relying on the social streams to bring you stuff- it becomes the passive voice act of information consumption. You rely on that the streams spray you with, be it by algorithms or by the following.

But when you flip that and take it on yourself to go out an find things to reading blogs, articles, heck books, , taking an active voice approach is very sensible and more meaningful to me. To go GET information, not expet some algorithm to synthetically summairze it into bite sized thought pellets.

And that’s why I would rather broker my time reading and commenting on blogs. Sure, i have fun being snarky in the socials, but I am wary or trying to be or depending on the damn streams.

Make your own paths and streams. Damnit.

Indeed, the blog silencer is now off. Keep at a safe distance.

Featured Image: Mine. It was not extruded by synthetic extraction, it is sometihng I saw out in the world, on the streets of Melbourne. Bark! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

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