aeslinnreads

[aeslinnreads]

"(...) above all, all the activism we do online must be tethered firmly to the physical world. And the more intentional we are about how we use social media, the more we'll ensure that social media doesn't use us."

Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix by Katherine Cross

[aeslinnreads]

"But we can save ourselves and those we love — and we most definitely should."

Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix by Katherine Cross

[aeslinnreads]

"Violence, it must be recognized, is sometimes necessary, but it's something else to lust for it. Lusting for violence does terrible things to you eventually."

Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix by Katherine Cross

[aeslinnreads]

"(...) social media's overtly discursive aspects provide a unique window into the compounding of that desensitization. How many times will you get to see violence used as a joke online, and how long will it be until it becomes a joke to you?"

Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix by Katherine Cross

[aeslinnreads]

"Amplifying our joy is amplifying our humanity; it is an antidote to terror, if not a viral one."

Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix by Katherine Cross

[aeslinnreads]

"Community is not something you simply find waiting for you on a platform like Twitter or Bluesky. One way or another, you have to build it."

Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix by Katherine Cross

[aeslinnreads]

"If there's no such thing as bad publicity, there's also no such thing as good social media Discourse once you've become a Main Character."

Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix by Katherine Cross

[aeslinnreads]

"(...) the internet as a whole has affordances of its own: as a distributed network, it affords us the ability to harass and harm people without ever once interacting with them directly. Your intent is irrelevant."

Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix by Katherine Cross

[aeslinnreads]

"How you behave on social media is the result of a mangle between your personal choices and morality, the platform affordances you have access to, and the social environment in which you find yourself. It's why you express yourself differently on different platforms."

Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix by Katherine Cross

[aeslinnreads]

"The grotesque irony at the heart of Web 2.0 and the social media platforms that define it is that it is a profoundly individualistic space. Despite being sold as the pinnacle of collectivity, contemporary social media is the epitome of "together alone," the metropolis without the charm, mass society without the society. For all the power of social networking, bringing thousands or even millions of people together in ways that would've been impossible hitherto, it channels us only towards one another, individually, rather than towards any grand collective design."

Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix by Katherine Cross

[aeslinnreads]

"We hurt each other with our words precisely because we can be hurt by them."

Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix by Katherine Cross

[aeslinnreads]

"There are no brakes, no speed bumps, nothing to stop a sufficiently viral campaign from spreading everywhere and smothering your reputation beneath it. That is what Twitter and TikTok can facilitate, and it is arguably the defining feature of Web 2.0."

Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix by Katherine Cross

[aeslinnreads]

"The way people justify bad behaviour online often boils down to a simple proposition: the internet is real when I need it to be, and it's "just" the internet when I don't."

Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix by Katherine Cross

[aeslinnreads]

"Social media has made it all too easy for us to focus on the wrong things, on trivial, private, cathartic non-victories at the expense of things that might last."

Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix by Katherine Cross

[aeslinnreads]

"But the longer you stay, the more you need to stay; your friends are there, your career may rely on the platform now. Moving your followers, your networks, your community becomes hard or impossible. Your garden suddenly has walls."

Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix by Katherine Cross

[aeslinnreads]

"(...) demobilizing disengagement that [their] platforms have slowly led us towards. [They] have alchemized activism into toxic Twitter beefs and seduced us into thinking that we're one viral campaign away from solving some massive socio-structural problem, which makes it all the easier to devote our energies to pursuing these digital white whales in lieu of more tangible goals in our lives and communities."

Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix by Katherine Cross

[aeslinnreads]

"This myth of social media's indispensability to our movements, not just as a tool but as the forum for change, is dangerous. If we internalize it too deeply, it actually demobilizes our movements, lulling us into mistaking quote-tweet wars and "clapbacks" for meaningful political action, seducing us into seeing nanoseconds of digital catharsis as an adequate substitute for change. It seduces us into mistaking the profitable content we generate for truly resistive speech — as well as tying our worth and our success, as people and activists, to the engagement metrics created by large tech corporations."

Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix by Katherine Cross