#which is also a repost of the images from that deleted flickr account

[andrevasims]

1993 JCPenney catalog

[shirlleycoyle]

How to Protest Without Sacrificing Your Digital Privacy

Thousands of protesters are filling the streets of American cities to protest the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, and police brutality writ large. Police officers have shown they’re more than willing to escalate violence with pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, vehicles, and other dangerous crowd suppression measures. In addition, law enforcement are likely heavily surveilling protests with all sorts of tech and spying gear. Already, we've seen a Customs and Border patrol drone flying over Minneapolis protests.

It's not just the cops that protesters need to worry about: when much of a protest is broadcast via tweets, viral video clips, and livestreams, those watching may also want to digitally target protesters, perhaps by identifying them publicly.

So, if you're a peaceful protester, but you don't necessarily want your participation in a demonstration to follow you around or lead to harassment online, what sort of steps can you take around your digital security?

Image: Neil Cooler/Flickr/CC-By-2.0

Bring a clean phone…

"They'll be, obviously, cell-site simulators," Matthew Mitchell, a founder of Crypto Harlem told Motherboard in a Signal call. These devices, otherwise known as IMSI-catchers, Stingrays, or more recently Crossbows, can record phones' geolocation, their phone number, and sometimes the content of texts and phone calls.

"If everyone is texting a couple of organizers, or calling a bunch of friends, that one friend that connected to all people could be identified," Mitchell said.

"What it'll say is this person was definitely at this place, at this time, and maybe you don't want that. Maybe you want to be able to show your support, show your political view, and having the ramifications for that, the cost of your free speech, to be low," he added.

SMS text messages are the easiest for police to intercept, and during a protest you should not assume that these will be private; if possible you should use an encrypted alternative (more info below).

READ MORE: What to Bring to a Peaceful Protest

If you'd rather make it harder for any data that is swept up by these devices to be linked to you personally, you might consider buying a new, dedicated device for the protest. Maybe a $100 Android phone, Mitchell suggested.

"Your privacy is worth more than that," Mitchell said. You could buy this with cash or a gift card too so it's not linked to your credit card records. Don't turn it on when at home with your normal phone, and switch it off when you leave the protest.

You may also want to quickly setup a new Gmail account, on public wifi, and then use that to download encrypted communication apps.

Image: Steve Barker/Flickr/CC-By-2.0

…Or bring no phone at all

Of course, those are several hoops to jump through, it's easy to screw it up somehow, and you might not have $100 to spend on a temporary protest phone. So the simpler, and probably more effective approach for protecting privacy, is to not bring a cell phone at all and rely on more traditional methods of activist coordination.

Agree to meet friends at a certain place, at a certain time. Maybe decide on multiple locations in case the protest is broken up or cordoned off by law enforcement.

Ultimately, there is a trade-off to be had between convenience and privacy while at a protest, and how much you're willing to sway on either side of that is up to you. That also depends on what particular information you want to protect and from whom; something that can be summed up as your own 'threat model' (for more on this, take a look at Motherboard's Guide to Not Getting Hacked).

Image: Paul Stein/Flickr/CC-by-SA 2.0

If you do bring your personal phone, encrypt it

In the end, you may want to just use your own device when going out and protesting. Just keep in mind that it will be relatively easy for law enforcement to identify you and your movements if they do want to access your phone records in some form.

If you're worried about cops, or anyone else, physically seizing and examining your phone, you should encrypt it if you haven't already, and in general keep the device as free of unnecessary information as possible. If you have a passcode on your iPhone, the device is encrypted. Many Androids are also encrypted by default, but you can double check by going to the Settings app, and then tapping on Security, there should be an option for encryption in the menu.

Disable Biometrics

If you use your fingerprint or your face (for example with the iPhone’s FaceID) to unlock your phone, disable them before going to the protest. In case of detention or arrest, the cops can theoretically force you to unlock your phone if it’s protected by biometrics.

This does not mean, however, that you should disable your passcode—it's critical to leave that enabled. Cops cannot legally force you to give up your passcode. On that note, remember to use a strong PIN or passcode, made of at least 9 to 12 digits, ideally combining numbers and letters. If your phone is ultimately seized and a warrant is needed to unlock it, having a longer, stronger passcode or passphrase will make it more difficult to unlock. At least one forensic company also offers law enforcement a tool that will install a piece of software onto a phone so that once the device is handed back to its owner, the software will secretly record their password. The police then seize the device and can unlock it.

Use these messaging apps

Encrypted messaging app Signal has Disappearing Messages, which deletes messages in a conversation after they've been seen. If you don't want someone being able to rummage through your old chats if they do happen to get access to them, you could turn this feature on.

And although it's relatively unlikely an adversary is going to attempt to read your Signal or WhatsApp messages while in transit, it's probably worth verifying each of your protest contacts' cryptographic fingerprints: in Signal these are known as Safety Numbers and in WhatsApp, they are known as Security Codes. While WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted, it's worth keeping in mind that Facebook does own the app, so take that into account when selecting a messaging app to use. iMessage is also encrypted, but if you have iCloud backups on, those are not encrypted. Wire is another good, end-to-end-encrypted app that also offers disappearing messages.

Scrub faces from your pictures

If you take pictures or videos of the protests, and want to post them publicly on social media, make sure there’s no faces in them that can help identify protesters. A new tool called “Image Scrubber” makes that process extremely easy. With it, it takes just a few seconds to anonymize a picture, potentially saving your fellow protesters from getting in trouble with the cops.

Create new social media accounts

"Media will be covering you, but you'll also be on livestreams and Twitter," Mitchell continued. Keep that in mind if you would rather your employer not know you're attending a protest for whatever reason, but also remember that plenty of other people will be monitoring social media looking for protesters to digitally harass.

If you did bring that phone and you're going to be sharing posts or photos yourself, you could make a new social media account for this purpose too. That way, those trying to dox protesters may have a harder time digging up your real identity.

"Understand that people who repost, retweet that the most—the timeline of where the original hashtag was created—all of that's of interest," Mitchell said.

If you do upload images and videos to social media, it's worth considering that street signs, the names of businesses, and other details in photos and video can easily give away your location; think about whether or not that is information you want to be public, and be especially careful if you are protesting very close to your home.

Consider turning off location services on your phone

If you want to share photos or updates on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, without people knowing your exact whereabouts, you should turn off Location Services for those apps (you can do that on Android and iPhone).

Or, you could check you're not inadvertently sharing constant updates on your location via Twitter's metadata if you don't want to.

Subscribe to our cybersecurity podcast, CYBER.

How to Protest Without Sacrificing Your Digital Privacy syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[oovitus]

How The Minimalists Are Using Social Media in 2018

By Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus · Follow: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram

Have you ever quit social media for an extended period of time? How did it change your perspective?

After using social media almost every day for the last seven years, we decided to walk away for a month to see what would happen. So, on December 31, 2017, before the ball dropped, we deleted all our past tweets and Instagram photos, we ceased our Facebook and Pinterest activity, and we uploaded a cryptic video alluding to our disappearance.

Then we were gone.

And now, a month later, we’re still alive, and we’re entering February 2018 with a blank slate.

During our month away, we learned some important lessons. And we unlearned a few bad habits. Most important, we discovered a need for us to use social media differently going forward.

Lessons Learned

Purpose. For us, once we’d created a blank slate, the purpose of social media became evident: communication. Not to sound overly simplistic, but want to use these platforms to effectively communicate our thoughts, ideas, and creations, and engage our audience directly with questions and answers—not broadcast our every thought. Social media can be a noisy place, and we don’t want to add to the noise—we want to whisper to the people who are listening.

Mindfulness. Whenever an activity occupies much of our mind, we need to take a step back and assess whether it’s worth the time we spend on that activity. Our friend Jessica Lynn Williams, who helps us organize our social feeds, discovered an important insight without the pall of social media in her everyday life: “Stepping away from social in January gave me the clarity of mind to see ‘the asshole in my mind running amuck’ (as Dan Harris says), and it has prompted me to adopt a regular meditation practice, which is something I’ve been afraid of for a while. This will be the year I take back my mind.”

Augmentation. We want to use social media to augment our creations—blog, podcast, books, films—not as the main platform on which we create. While we’ll be active on the different platforms, it’s worth noting that the best place to follow The Minimalists isn’t social media; the best place to follow our creations is by subscribing to our blog or by subscribing to our podcast (or both). Social media will simply append those platforms.

Unfollow. Whether it’s celebrities on Instagram, friends on Facebook, or news outlets on Twitter, the folks we follow often negatively affect our moods. We get caught up comparing ourselves with others, we get dragged down by naysayers, and we start twitching for 24-hour “breaking” news. Whenever this is the case, it’s best to unfollow those negative influences and instead curate a feed that includes people and brands who inform us, challenge us, and improve us. Letting go of the negative is the only way to make room for the valuable.

Value. As The Minimalists, we’ll post to social media only when it will add value for others. Before we publish to any platform, we must be able to affirmatively answer one question: Does this add value? If not, then delete.

Unlearned Bad Habits

Idiots. If the purpose of social media is to communicate with other humans, then we also must be careful with whom we engage. People find it easy to be keyboard crusaders, interactions with whom are rarely productive, so it’s important not to engage with the snarky critics, because this isn’t for them. Hence, if you’re a seagull, you’ll be blocked without discrimination, and you won’t be unblocked—ever. We have a renewed desire to communicate with our audience and a new vigor to avoid arguing with idiots.

Pacifiers. By removing the social media apps from our phones—which often pacified us whenever we had a silent moment in an airport, waiting room, or other interstitial zone—we learned that new pacifiers always appear. If you get rid of Facebook, you twitch for Twitter. If Instagram is gone, YouTube steps in. Two thousand years ago, the Stoics complained about people getting lost in books instead of going out and experiencing the real world. Today, we complain that nobody reads books anymore because everyone is lost in the tempting glow of their screens. Whether it’s books or social media we get lost in, we must work hard to use these tools deliberately to help us function in the real world—not remove ourselves from it.

Promoless. There’s too much “branding” going on these days. No, there aren’t any advertisements on our website or podcast or social media feeds, but even we have been guilty of too much self-promotion getting in the way of our own creations. Perhaps Derek Sivers said it best: putting ads in your work is like putting a Coke machine in a monastery. We feel the same about all the shameless self-promotion that’s going on these days, including our own. It’s solipsism run amuck. We’re pledging to remove the Coke machine from the monastery immediately so you can better enjoy what we’re creating and sharing without the promotional eyesores. Yes, we’ll occasionally talk about what we’re working on—including events, books, and projects—but we won’t let it get in the way of what we’re creating. If anything, promotion should be similar to the end credits of a film, not the main plot.

Triplicate. Over the years, we began using the different social media platforms the same exact way, which, when you think about it, is insane. It was a digital version of those old carbon-copy forms from decades past: post a photo to Instagram, repost it to Twitter, and then re-repost it to Facebook. Lather, rinse, repeat. Triplicating our efforts isn’t only tedious, it’s the opposite of using these platforms intentionally.

Using Social Media Differently

Because each social media platform is different, we want to use them differently—not as a carbon copy—so we’ve decided to focus on the specific strengths of each platform by identifying their primary and secondary uses. These changes should help us avoid creative overlap and will allow us better communicate with our audience as a result.

Facebook. We’ve found our Facebook audience engages most with the articles we post. Thus, we’ll use our Facebook account primarily to share useful links, be it our essays or others’ articles. Secondarily, we’ll use Facebook to publish short Audiograms and photo albums from past tours.

Twitter. Twitter is the best platform for us to share our text-only Minimal Maxims, so that will be its primary use. Secondarily, we’ll use Twitter to communicate directly with our audience: the brevity of this platform makes it the best place to interact with other people, so if you want to interact with us directly, Twitter is the best place to do so.

Instagram. Instagram is undoubtedly the best platform to share photos, so, going forward, we’ll use IG primarily to share beautiful black-and-white images. Secondarily, we’ll use the ephemerality of Instagram Stories to broadcast updates, current events, ephemera, and useful excerpts from our blogposts and podcasts. And we’ll occasionally use Instagram Live for unplanned live broadcasts, which are deleted after 24 hours.

Pinterest. Pinterest is the Internet’s corkboard, so it’s ideal us for us is to share letter boards that contain challenges and simple-living reminders from The Minimalists. We’ll also use our Pinterest account to repost photos of minimalist living spaces.

YouTube. Since YouTube is the premier video platform, this is where we’ll publish videos created by The Minimalists. This will be especially relevant when we add a video version of our podcast later this year. Secondarily, we’ll use YouTube to post other video creations: video essays, web series, and scheduled livestreams.

You’ll notice our absence from most social platforms: Snapchat, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Ello, Google+, Periscope, Flickr, Reddit, Quora, et al. That’s not because these services aren’t useful; they simply aren’t useful for us right now.

All things considered, we hope to use our new strategy to creatively add value to people’s lives. This is our recipe, and it isn’t ideal for everyone. Truth be told, it might not be ideal for anyone but us. And even then, we’ll likely adjust how we wield these tools after using them differently for a while.

No, we don’t expect you to follow us on every platform. Hell, we don’t expect you to follow us any platform. But if you find value in what we’re communicating, feel free to join us on our new journey. And if you ever stop finding value in what we’re sharing, please unfollow us at anytime.

P.S. Ella will continue tweeting her beautiful nonsense as usual.

Subscribe to The Minimalists via email.

How The Minimalists Are Using Social Media in 2018 published first on

[mylinkspagereview-blog]

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[oovitus]

How The Minimalists Are Using Social Media in 2018

By Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus · Follow: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram

Have you ever quit social media for an extended period of time? How did it change your perspective?

After using social media almost every day for the last seven years, we decided to walk away for a month to see what would happen. So, on December 31, 2017, before the ball dropped, we deleted all our past tweets and Instagram photos, we ceased our Facebook and Pinterest activity, and we uploaded a cryptic video alluding to our disappearance.

Then we were gone.

And now, a month later, we’re still alive, and we’re entering February 2018 with a blank slate.

During our month away, we learned some important lessons. And we unlearned a few bad habits. Most important, we discovered a need for us to use social media differently going forward.

Lessons Learned

Purpose. For us, once we’d created a blank slate, the purpose of social media became evident: communication. Not to sound overly simplistic, but want to use these platforms to effectively communicate our thoughts, ideas, and creations, and engage our audience directly with questions and answers—not broadcast our every thought. Social media can be a noisy place, and we don’t want to add to the noise—we want to whisper to the people who are listening.

Mindfulness. Whenever an activity occupies much of our mind, we need to take a step back and assess whether it’s worth the time we spend on that activity. Our friend Jessica Lynn Williams, who helps us organize our social feeds, discovered an important insight without the pall of social media in her everyday life: “Stepping away from social in January gave me the clarity of mind to see ‘the asshole in my mind running amuck’ (as Dan Harris says), and it has prompted me to adopt a regular meditation practice, which is something I’ve been afraid of for a while. This will be the year I take back my mind.”

Augmentation. We want to use social media to augment our creations—blog, podcast, books, films—not as the main platform on which we create. While we’ll be active on the different platforms, it’s worth noting that the best place to follow The Minimalists isn’t social media; the best place to follow our creations is by subscribing to our blog or by subscribing to our podcast (or both). Social media will simply append those platforms.

Unfollow. Whether it’s celebrities on Instagram, friends on Facebook, or news outlets on Twitter, the folks we follow often negatively affect our moods. We get caught up comparing ourselves with others, we get dragged down by naysayers, and we start twitching for 24-hour “breaking” news. Whenever this is the case, it’s best to unfollow those negative influences and instead curate a feed that includes people and brands who inform us, challenge us, and improve us. Letting go of the negative is the only way to make room for the valuable.

Value. As The Minimalists, we’ll post to social media only when it will add value for others. Before we publish to any platform, we must be able to affirmatively answer one question: Does this add value? If not, then delete.

Unlearned Bad Habits

Idiots. If the purpose of social media is to communicate with other humans, then we also must be careful with whom we engage. People find it easy to be keyboard crusaders, interactions with whom are rarely productive, so it’s important not to engage with the snarky critics, because this isn’t for them. Hence, if you’re a seagull, you’ll be blocked without discrimination, and you won’t be unblocked—ever. We have a renewed desire to communicate with our audience and a new vigor to avoid arguing with idiots.

Pacifiers. By removing the social media apps from our phones—which often pacified us whenever we had a silent moment in an airport, waiting room, or other interstitial zone—we learned that new pacifiers always appear. If you get rid of Facebook, you twitch for Twitter. If Instagram is gone, YouTube steps in. Two thousand years ago, the Stoics complained about people getting lost in books instead of going out and experiencing the real world. Today, we complain that nobody reads books anymore because everyone is lost in the tempting glow of their screens. Whether it’s books or social media we get lost in, we must work hard to use these tools deliberately to help us function in the real world—not remove ourselves from it.

Promoless. There’s too much “branding” going on these days. No, there aren’t any advertisements on our website or podcast or social media feeds, but even we have been guilty of too much self-promotion getting in the way of our own creations. Perhaps Derek Sivers said it best: putting ads in your work is like putting a Coke machine in a monastery. We feel the same about all the shameless self-promotion that’s going on these days, including our own. It’s solipsism run amuck. We’re pledging to remove the Coke machine from the monastery immediately so you can better enjoy what we’re creating and sharing without the promotional eyesores. Yes, we’ll occasionally talk about what we’re working on—including events, books, and projects—but we won’t let it get in the way of what we’re creating. If anything, promotion should be similar to the end credits of a film, not the main plot.

Triplicate. Over the years, we began using the different social media platforms the same exact way, which, when you think about it, is insane. It was a digital version of those old carbon-copy forms from decades past: post a photo to Instagram, repost it to Twitter, and then re-repost it to Facebook. Lather, rinse, repeat. Triplicating our efforts isn’t only tedious, it’s the opposite of using these platforms intentionally.

Using Social Media Differently

Because each social media platform is different, we want to use them differently—not as a carbon copy—so we’ve decided to focus on the specific strengths of each platform by identifying their primary and secondary uses. These changes should help us avoid creative overlap and will allow us better communicate with our audience as a result.

Facebook. We’ve found our Facebook audience engages most with the articles we post. Thus, we’ll use our Facebook account primarily to share useful links, be it our essays or others’ articles. Secondarily, we’ll use Facebook to publish short Audiograms and photo albums from past tours.

Twitter. Twitter is the best platform for us to share our text-only Minimal Maxims, so that will be its primary use. Secondarily, we’ll use Twitter to communicate directly with our audience: the brevity of this platform makes it the best place to interact with other people, so if you want to interact with us directly, Twitter is the best place to do so.

Instagram. Instagram is undoubtedly the best platform to share photos, so, going forward, we’ll use IG primarily to share beautiful black-and-white images. Secondarily, we’ll use the ephemerality of Instagram Stories to broadcast updates, current events, ephemera, and useful excerpts from our blogposts and podcasts. And we’ll occasionally use Instagram Live for unplanned live broadcasts, which are deleted after 24 hours.

Pinterest. Pinterest is the Internet’s corkboard, so it’s ideal us for us is to share letter boards that contain challenges and simple-living reminders from The Minimalists. We’ll also use our Pinterest account to repost photos of minimalist living spaces.

YouTube. Since YouTube is the premier video platform, this is where we’ll publish videos created by The Minimalists. This will be especially relevant when we add a video version of our podcast later this year. Secondarily, we’ll use YouTube to post other video creations: video essays, web series, and scheduled livestreams.

You’ll notice our absence from most social platforms: Snapchat, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Ello, Google+, Periscope, Flickr, Reddit, Quora, et al. That’s not because these services aren’t useful; they simply aren’t useful for us right now.

All things considered, we hope to use our new strategy to creatively add value to people’s lives. This is our recipe, and it isn’t ideal for everyone. Truth be told, it might not be ideal for anyone but us. And even then, we’ll likely adjust how we wield these tools after using them differently for a while.

No, we don’t expect you to follow us on every platform. Hell, we don’t expect you to follow us any platform. But if you find value in what we’re communicating, feel free to join us on our new journey. And if you ever stop finding value in what we’re sharing, please unfollow us at anytime.

P.S. Ella will continue tweeting her beautiful nonsense as usual.

Subscribe to The Minimalists via email.

How The Minimalists Are Using Social Media in 2018 published first on

[oovitus]

How The Minimalists Are Using Social Media in 2018

By Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus · Follow: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram

Have you ever quit social media for an extended period of time? How did it change your perspective?

After using social media almost every day for the last seven years, we decided to walk away for a month to see what would happen. So, on December 31, 2017, before the ball dropped, we deleted all our past tweets and Instagram photos, we ceased our Facebook and Pinterest activity, and we uploaded a cryptic video alluding to our disappearance.

Then we were gone.

And now, a month later, we’re still alive, and we’re entering February 2018 with a blank slate.

During our month away, we learned some important lessons. And we unlearned a few bad habits. Most important, we discovered a need for us to use social media differently going forward.

Lessons Learned

Purpose. For us, once we’d created a blank slate, the purpose of social media became evident: communication. Not to sound overly simplistic, but want to use these platforms to effectively communicate our thoughts, ideas, and creations, and engage our audience directly with questions and answers—not broadcast our every thought. Social media can be a noisy place, and we don’t want to add to the noise—we want to whisper to the people who are listening.

Mindfulness. Whenever an activity occupies much of our mind, we need to take a step back and assess whether it’s worth the time we spend on that activity. Our friend Jessica Lynn Williams, who helps us organize our social feeds, discovered an important insight without the pall of social media in her everyday life: “Stepping away from social in January gave me the clarity of mind to see ‘the asshole in my mind running amuck’ (as Dan Harris says), and it has prompted me to adopt a regular meditation practice, which is something I’ve been afraid of for a while. This will be the year I take back my mind.”

Augmentation. We want to use social media to augment our creations—blog, podcast, books, films—not as the main platform on which we create. While we’ll be active on the different platforms, it’s worth noting that the best place to follow The Minimalists isn’t social media; the best place to follow our creations is by subscribing to our blog or by subscribing to our podcast (or both). Social media will simply append those platforms.

Unfollow. Whether it’s celebrities on Instagram, friends on Facebook, or news outlets on Twitter, the folks we follow often negatively affect our moods. We get caught up comparing ourselves with others, we get dragged down by naysayers, and we start twitching for 24-hour “breaking” news. Whenever this is the case, it’s best to unfollow those negative influences and instead curate a feed that includes people and brands who inform us, challenge us, and improve us. Letting go of the negative is the only way to make room for the valuable.

Value. As The Minimalists, we’ll post to social media only when it will add value for others. Before we publish to any platform, we must be able to affirmatively answer one question: Does this add value? If not, then delete.

Unlearned Bad Habits

Idiots. If the purpose of social media is to communicate with other humans, then we also must be careful with whom we engage. People find it easy to be keyboard crusaders, interactions with whom are rarely productive, so it’s important not to engage with the snarky critics, because this isn’t for them. Hence, if you’re a seagull, you’ll be blocked without discrimination, and you won’t be unblocked—ever. We have a renewed desire to communicate with our audience and a new vigor to avoid arguing with idiots.

Pacifiers. By removing the social media apps from our phones—which often pacified us whenever we had a silent moment in an airport, waiting room, or other interstitial zone—we learned that new pacifiers always appear. If you get rid of Facebook, you twitch for Twitter. If Instagram is gone, YouTube steps in. Two thousand years ago, the Stoics complained about people getting lost in books instead of going out and experiencing the real world. Today, we complain that nobody reads books anymore because everyone is lost in the tempting glow of their screens. Whether it’s books or social media we get lost in, we must work hard to use these tools deliberately to help us function in the real world—not remove ourselves from it.

Promoless. There’s too much “branding” going on these days. No, there aren’t any advertisements on our website or podcast or social media feeds, but even we have been guilty of too much self-promotion getting in the way of our own creations. Perhaps Derek Sivers said it best: putting ads in your work is like putting a Coke machine in a monastery. We feel the same about all the shameless self-promotion that’s going on these days, including our own. It’s solipsism run amuck. We’re pledging to remove the Coke machine from the monastery immediately so you can better enjoy what we’re creating and sharing without the promotional eyesores. Yes, we’ll occasionally talk about what we’re working on—including events, books, and projects—but we won’t let it get in the way of what we’re creating. If anything, promotion should be similar to the end credits of a film, not the main plot.

Triplicate. Over the years, we began using the different social media platforms the same exact way, which, when you think about it, is insane. It was a digital version of those old carbon-copy forms from decades past: post a photo to Instagram, repost it to Twitter, and then re-repost it to Facebook. Lather, rinse, repeat. Triplicating our efforts isn’t only tedious, it’s the opposite of using these platforms intentionally.

Using Social Media Differently

Because each social media platform is different, we want to use them differently—not as a carbon copy—so we’ve decided to focus on the specific strengths of each platform by identifying their primary and secondary uses. These changes should help us avoid creative overlap and will allow us better communicate with our audience as a result.

Facebook. We’ve found our Facebook audience engages most with the articles we post. Thus, we’ll use our Facebook account primarily to share useful links, be it our essays or others’ articles. Secondarily, we’ll use Facebook to publish short Audiograms and photo albums from past tours.

Twitter. Twitter is the best platform for us to share our text-only Minimal Maxims, so that will be its primary use. Secondarily, we’ll use Twitter to communicate directly with our audience: the brevity of this platform makes it the best place to interact with other people, so if you want to interact with us directly, Twitter is the best place to do so.

Instagram. Instagram is undoubtedly the best platform to share photos, so, going forward, we’ll use IG primarily to share beautiful black-and-white images. Secondarily, we’ll use the ephemerality of Instagram Stories to broadcast updates, current events, ephemera, and useful excerpts from our blogposts and podcasts. And we’ll occasionally use Instagram Live for unplanned live broadcasts, which are deleted after 24 hours.

Pinterest. Pinterest is the Internet’s corkboard, so it’s ideal us for us is to share letter boards that contain challenges and simple-living reminders from The Minimalists. We’ll also use our Pinterest account to repost photos of minimalist living spaces.

YouTube. Since YouTube is the premier video platform, this is where we’ll publish videos created by The Minimalists. This will be especially relevant when we add a video version of our podcast later this year. Secondarily, we’ll use YouTube to post other video creations: video essays, web series, and scheduled livestreams.

You’ll notice our absence from most social platforms: Snapchat, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Ello, Google+, Periscope, Flickr, Reddit, Quora, et al. That’s not because these services aren’t useful; they simply aren’t useful for us right now.

All things considered, we hope to use our new strategy to creatively add value to people’s lives. This is our recipe, and it isn’t ideal for everyone. Truth be told, it might not be ideal for anyone but us. And even then, we’ll likely adjust how we wield these tools after using them differently for a while.

No, we don’t expect you to follow us on every platform. Hell, we don’t expect you to follow us any platform. But if you find value in what we’re communicating, feel free to join us on our new journey. And if you ever stop finding value in what we’re sharing, please unfollow us at anytime.

P.S. Ella will continue tweeting her beautiful nonsense as usual.

Subscribe to The Minimalists via email.

How The Minimalists Are Using Social Media in 2018 published first on https://storeseapharmacy.tumblr.com

[oovitus]

How The Minimalists Are Using Social Media in 2018

By Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus · Follow: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram

Have you ever quit social media for an extended period of time? How did it change your perspective?

After using social media almost every day for the last seven years, we decided to walk away for a month to see what would happen. So, on December 31, 2017, before the ball dropped, we deleted all our past tweets and Instagram photos, we ceased our Facebook and Pinterest activity, and we uploaded a cryptic video alluding to our disappearance.

Then we were gone.

And now, a month later, we’re still alive, and we’re entering February 2018 with a blank slate.

During our month away, we learned some important lessons. And we unlearned a few bad habits. Most important, we discovered a need for us to use social media differently going forward.

Lessons Learned

Purpose. For us, once we’d created a blank slate, the purpose of social media became evident: communication. Not to sound overly simplistic, but want to use these platforms to effectively communicate our thoughts, ideas, and creations, and engage our audience directly with questions and answers—not broadcast our every thought. Social media can be a noisy place, and we don’t want to add to the noise—we want to whisper to the people who are listening.

Mindfulness. Whenever an activity occupies much of our mind, we need to take a step back and assess whether it’s worth the time we spend on that activity. Our friend Jessica Lynn Williams, who helps us organize our social feeds, discovered an important insight without the pall of social media in her everyday life: “Stepping away from social in January gave me the clarity of mind to see ‘the asshole in my mind running amuck’ (as Dan Harris says), and it has prompted me to adopt a regular meditation practice, which is something I’ve been afraid of for a while. This will be the year I take back my mind.”

Augmentation. We want to use social media to augment our creations—blog, podcast, books, films—not as the main platform on which we create. While we’ll be active on the different platforms, it’s worth noting that the best place to follow The Minimalists isn’t social media; the best place to follow our creations is by subscribing to our blog or by subscribing to our podcast (or both). Social media will simply append those platforms.

Unfollow. Whether it’s celebrities on Instagram, friends on Facebook, or news outlets on Twitter, the folks we follow often negatively affect our moods. We get caught up comparing ourselves with others, we get dragged down by naysayers, and we start twitching for 24-hour “breaking” news. Whenever this is the case, it’s best to unfollow those negative influences and instead curate a feed that includes people and brands who inform us, challenge us, and improve us. Letting go of the negative is the only way to make room for the valuable.

Value. As The Minimalists, we’ll post to social media only when it will add value for others. Before we publish to any platform, we must be able to affirmatively answer one question: Does this add value? If not, then delete.

Unlearned Bad Habits

Idiots. If the purpose of social media is to communicate with other humans, then we also must be careful with whom we engage. People find it easy to be keyboard crusaders, interactions with whom are rarely productive, so it’s important not to engage with the snarky critics, because this isn’t for them. Hence, if you’re a seagull, you’ll be blocked without discrimination, and you won’t be unblocked—ever. We have a renewed desire to communicate with our audience and a new vigor to avoid arguing with idiots.

Pacifiers. By removing the social media apps from our phones—which often pacified us whenever we had a silent moment in an airport, waiting room, or other interstitial zone—we learned that new pacifiers always appear. If you get rid of Facebook, you twitch for Twitter. If Instagram is gone, YouTube steps in. Two thousand years ago, the Stoics complained about people getting lost in books instead of going out and experiencing the real world. Today, we complain that nobody reads books anymore because everyone is lost in the tempting glow of their screens. Whether it’s books or social media we get lost in, we must work hard to use these tools deliberately to help us function in the real world—not remove ourselves from it.

Promoless. There’s too much “branding” going on these days. No, there aren’t any advertisements on our website or podcast or social media feeds, but even we have been guilty of too much self-promotion getting in the way of our own creations. Perhaps Derek Sivers said it best: putting ads in your work is like putting a Coke machine in a monastery. We feel the same about all the shameless self-promotion that’s going on these days, including our own. It’s solipsism run amuck. We’re pledging to remove the Coke machine from the monastery immediately so you can better enjoy what we’re creating and sharing without the promotional eyesores. Yes, we’ll occasionally talk about what we’re working on—including events, books, and projects—but we won’t let it get in the way of what we’re creating. If anything, promotion should be similar to the end credits of a film, not the main plot.

Triplicate. Over the years, we began using the different social media platforms the same exact way, which, when you think about it, is insane. It was a digital version of those old carbon-copy forms from decades past: post a photo to Instagram, repost it to Twitter, and then re-repost it to Facebook. Lather, rinse, repeat. Triplicating our efforts isn’t only tedious, it’s the opposite of using these platforms intentionally.

Using Social Media Differently

Because each social media platform is different, we want to use them differently—not as a carbon copy—so we’ve decided to focus on the specific strengths of each platform by identifying their primary and secondary uses. These changes should help us avoid creative overlap and will allow us better communicate with our audience as a result.

Facebook. We’ve found our Facebook audience engages most with the articles we post. Thus, we’ll use our Facebook account primarily to share useful links, be it our essays or others’ articles. Secondarily, we’ll use Facebook to publish short Audiograms and photo albums from past tours.

Twitter. Twitter is the best platform for us to share our text-only Minimal Maxims, so that will be its primary use. Secondarily, we’ll use Twitter to communicate directly with our audience: the brevity of this platform makes it the best place to interact with other people, so if you want to interact with us directly, Twitter is the best place to do so.

Instagram. Instagram is undoubtedly the best platform to share photos, so, going forward, we’ll use IG primarily to share beautiful black-and-white images. Secondarily, we’ll use the ephemerality of Instagram Stories to broadcast updates, current events, ephemera, and useful excerpts from our blogposts and podcasts. And we’ll occasionally use Instagram Live for unplanned live broadcasts, which are deleted after 24 hours.

Pinterest. Pinterest is the Internet’s corkboard, so it’s ideal us for us is to share letter boards that contain challenges and simple-living reminders from The Minimalists. We’ll also use our Pinterest account to repost photos of minimalist living spaces.

YouTube. Since YouTube is the premier video platform, this is where we’ll publish videos created by The Minimalists. This will be especially relevant when we add a video version of our podcast later this year. Secondarily, we’ll use YouTube to post other video creations: video essays, web series, and scheduled livestreams.

You’ll notice our absence from most social platforms: Snapchat, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Ello, Google+, Periscope, Flickr, Reddit, Quora, et al. That’s not because these services aren’t useful; they simply aren’t useful for us right now.

All things considered, we hope to use our new strategy to creatively add value to people’s lives. This is our recipe, and it isn’t ideal for everyone. Truth be told, it might not be ideal for anyone but us. And even then, we’ll likely adjust how we wield these tools after using them differently for a while.

No, we don’t expect you to follow us on every platform. Hell, we don’t expect you to follow us any platform. But if you find value in what we’re communicating, feel free to join us on our new journey. And if you ever stop finding value in what we’re sharing, please unfollow us at anytime.

P.S. Ella will continue tweeting her beautiful nonsense as usual.

Subscribe to The Minimalists via email.

How The Minimalists Are Using Social Media in 2018 published first on https://storeseapharmacy.tumblr.com

[oovitus]

How The Minimalists Are Using Social Media in 2018

By Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus · Follow: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram

Have you ever quit social media for an extended period of time? How did it change your perspective?

After using social media almost every day for the last seven years, we decided to walk away for a month to see what would happen. So, on December 31, 2017, before the ball dropped, we deleted all our past tweets and Instagram photos, we ceased our Facebook and Pinterest activity, and we uploaded a cryptic video alluding to our disappearance.

Then we were gone.

And now, a month later, we’re still alive, and we’re entering February 2018 with a blank slate.

During our month away, we learned some important lessons. And we unlearned a few bad habits. Most important, we discovered a need for us to use social media differently going forward.

Lessons Learned

Purpose. For us, once we’d created a blank slate, the purpose of social media became evident: communication. Not to sound overly simplistic, but want to use these platforms to effectively communicate our thoughts, ideas, and creations, and engage our audience directly with questions and answers—not broadcast our every thought. Social media can be a noisy place, and we don’t want to add to the noise—we want to whisper to the people who are listening.

Mindfulness. Whenever an activity occupies much of our mind, we need to take a step back and assess whether it’s worth the time we spend on that activity. Our friend Jessica Lynn Williams, who helps us organize our social feeds, discovered an important insight without the pall of social media in her everyday life: “Stepping away from social in January gave me the clarity of mind to see ‘the asshole in my mind running amuck’ (as Dan Harris says), and it has prompted me to adopt a regular meditation practice, which is something I’ve been afraid of for a while. This will be the year I take back my mind.”

Augmentation. We want to use social media to augment our creations—blog, podcast, books, films—not as the main platform on which we create. While we’ll be active on the different platforms, it’s worth noting that the best place to follow The Minimalists isn’t social media; the best place to follow our creations is by subscribing to our blog or by subscribing to our podcast (or both). Social media will simply append those platforms.

Unfollow. Whether it’s celebrities on Instagram, friends on Facebook, or news outlets on Twitter, the folks we follow often negatively affect our moods. We get caught up comparing ourselves with others, we get dragged down by naysayers, and we start twitching for 24-hour “breaking” news. Whenever this is the case, it’s best to unfollow those negative influences and instead curate a feed that includes people and brands who inform us, challenge us, and improve us. Letting go of the negative is the only way to make room for the valuable.

Value. As The Minimalists, we’ll post to social media only when it will add value for others. Before we publish to any platform, we must be able to affirmatively answer one question: Does this add value? If not, then delete.

Unlearned Bad Habits

Idiots. If the purpose of social media is to communicate with other humans, then we also must be careful with whom we engage. People find it easy to be keyboard crusaders, interactions with whom are rarely productive, so it’s important not to engage with the snarky critics, because this isn’t for them. Hence, if you’re a seagull, you’ll be blocked without discrimination, and you won’t be unblocked—ever. We have a renewed desire to communicate with our audience and a new vigor to avoid arguing with idiots.

Pacifiers. By removing the social media apps from our phones—which often pacified us whenever we had a silent moment in an airport, waiting room, or other interstitial zone—we learned that new pacifiers always appear. If you get rid of Facebook, you twitch for Twitter. If Instagram is gone, YouTube steps in. Two thousand years ago, the Stoics complained about people getting lost in books instead of going out and experiencing the real world. Today, we complain that nobody reads books anymore because everyone is lost in the tempting glow of their screens. Whether it’s books or social media we get lost in, we must work hard to use these tools deliberately to help us function in the real world—not remove ourselves from it.

Promoless. There’s too much “branding” going on these days. No, there aren’t any advertisements on our website or podcast or social media feeds, but even we have been guilty of too much self-promotion getting in the way of our own creations. Perhaps Derek Sivers said it best: putting ads in your work is like putting a Coke machine in a monastery. We feel the same about all the shameless self-promotion that’s going on these days, including our own. It’s solipsism run amuck. We’re pledging to remove the Coke machine from the monastery immediately so you can better enjoy what we’re creating and sharing without the promotional eyesores. Yes, we’ll occasionally talk about what we’re working on—including events, books, and projects—but we won’t let it get in the way of what we’re creating. If anything, promotion should be similar to the end credits of a film, not the main plot.

Triplicate. Over the years, we began using the different social media platforms the same exact way, which, when you think about it, is insane. It was a digital version of those old carbon-copy forms from decades past: post a photo to Instagram, repost it to Twitter, and then re-repost it to Facebook. Lather, rinse, repeat. Triplicating our efforts isn’t only tedious, it’s the opposite of using these platforms intentionally.

Using Social Media Differently

Because each social media platform is different, we want to use them differently—not as a carbon copy—so we’ve decided to focus on the specific strengths of each platform by identifying their primary and secondary uses. These changes should help us avoid creative overlap and will allow us better communicate with our audience as a result.

Facebook. We’ve found our Facebook audience engages most with the articles we post. Thus, we’ll use our Facebook account primarily to share useful links, be it our essays or others’ articles. Secondarily, we’ll use Facebook to publish short Audiograms and photo albums from past tours.

Twitter. Twitter is the best platform for us to share our text-only Minimal Maxims, so that will be its primary use. Secondarily, we’ll use Twitter to communicate directly with our audience: the brevity of this platform makes it the best place to interact with other people, so if you want to interact with us directly, Twitter is the best place to do so.

Instagram. Instagram is undoubtedly the best platform to share photos, so, going forward, we’ll use IG primarily to share beautiful black-and-white images. Secondarily, we’ll use the ephemerality of Instagram Stories to broadcast updates, current events, ephemera, and useful excerpts from our blogposts and podcasts. And we’ll occasionally use Instagram Live for unplanned live broadcasts, which are deleted after 24 hours.

Pinterest. Pinterest is the Internet’s corkboard, so it’s ideal us for us is to share letter boards that contain challenges and simple-living reminders from The Minimalists. We’ll also use our Pinterest account to repost photos of minimalist living spaces.

YouTube. Since YouTube is the premier video platform, this is where we’ll publish videos created by The Minimalists. This will be especially relevant when we add a video version of our podcast later this year. Secondarily, we’ll use YouTube to post other video creations: video essays, web series, and scheduled livestreams.

You’ll notice our absence from most social platforms: Snapchat, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Ello, Google+, Periscope, Flickr, Reddit, Quora, et al. That’s not because these services aren’t useful; they simply aren’t useful for us right now.

All things considered, we hope to use our new strategy to creatively add value to people’s lives. This is our recipe, and it isn’t ideal for everyone. Truth be told, it might not be ideal for anyone but us. And even then, we’ll likely adjust how we wield these tools after using them differently for a while.

No, we don’t expect you to follow us on every platform. Hell, we don’t expect you to follow us any platform. But if you find value in what we’re communicating, feel free to join us on our new journey. And if you ever stop finding value in what we’re sharing, please unfollow us at anytime.

P.S. Ella will continue tweeting her beautiful nonsense as usual.

Subscribe to The Minimalists via email.

How The Minimalists Are Using Social Media in 2018 published first on