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Redefining online community Part 4: The wide and deep world of blogs and podcasts

2/28/2022

It’s a big, big world and there’s something for everyone.
We live in the information age, which the Cambridge dictionary defines as “the present time, in which large amounts of information are available because of developments in computer technology.” In this age, the ability to shape opinions from peer to peer has grown vital. Two popular and powerful vehicles for the flow of that information that I personally tune into are blogs and podcasts, and in this post I’m going to explore how we might be affected by both.

Chances are pretty good that somebody’s doing a blog or podcast about everything and anything you might be interested in, and services like Spotify and Podbean make it really easy to find a plethora of information anytime. Looking for some solid ideas about how to handle home and family issues in today’s chaotic world? Check out Becky Mansfield’s Your Modern Family blog site. Want to learn about how the actions of humans could inadvertently lead to the end of civilization and what we can each do to prevent it? Explore it with Josh in The End of The World with Josh Clark. Maybe you’re pondering what it means to be human and who we will be to each other in community as things evolve – in which case you might enjoy checking out the Peabody-award winning On Being podcast by Krista Tippett or the excellent Sam Harris podcast Making Sense. In the big, big online world I honestly find that the challenge isn’t to FIND information about virtually anything – it’s to sort through everything that’s out there to get to the stuff that’s most relevant and helpful to what I’m exploring.

Breadth and depth.
Looking to explore a really broad set of related topics? Pick your subject and go! With a quick online search you’ll find blogs and podcasts that take you to the most remote corners of whatever you’re interested in. A good example is the earlier-mentioned Your Modern Family blog site, where Becky Mansfield – a mother, a wife, an elementary-school teacher, and a child-development therapist - covers family-related topics ranging from marriage, parenting and kids activities to saving money and preparing healthy meals for your family. On sites like hers, you benefit from the knowledge, experience, opinions, and resource-base of a real person who has personally walked a path similar to your own – and who isn’t trying to convince you to buy something while you’re there.

Want to go really deep on something and learn from experts in the field? The information age blesses us with access to the most amazing people from almost any discipline you can think of. As a social entrepreneur building something vastly different from anything I’ve seen out there, I’m learning a ton from the How I Built This podcast by Guy Raz. He does in-depth, insightful interviews with other builders who created something amazing, and then chose to share their amazing stories for the benefit of people just like me. I particularly got into his January 2022 interview with Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson, in which a Buddhist monk and a man burnt out from a high-powered job at a London ad agency tell how they collaborated to create Headspace - a guided meditation app that now has users in 190 countries and annual revenue over $100 million. Another really good interview with a thought leader that got me thinking in a whole different way is Krista Tippett’s February 2022 interview with visionary Trabian Shorters about the concept of asset framing. As a community builder, the idea of defining and engaging the people I’m trying to serve in terms of the assets they bring to the table rather than their deficiencies is so important - and yet so simple. Seriously, how else would I possibly get insights from people like Andy, Rich, and Trabian?

Swimming in the wide, deep ocean.
In my mind, the idea of navigating the near-infinite breadth and seemingly limitless depth of the world of blog sites and podcasts conjures a vision of getting dropped into the middle of a vast ocean. Can it be invigorating and exciting? For sure! Is it easy and completely safe? Ehhhh … maybe not so much.

It’s certainly easy to find general information in this wide and deep ocean, but finding the specific, useful, high-quality info you seek can be a challenge. Whether you’re using Google, Bing, Safari, or DuckDuckGo, the results of any basic search will return more information than you can possibly use and much of it won’t be useful at all. Information overload is a real thing! Looking in the right places, knowing the right search terms to use, and effective use of filtering are all important tools to use to most easily get to the exact information you need.

While there aren’t any literal sharks swimming around in this ocean of information, there are certainly metaphorical predators to keep an eye out for. While you’re busily searching and surfing the internet, there are often dark shadows emerging from the depths to check you out as possible prey as well. For one, nefarious characters like phishers, scammers, or hackers will try to capture personal information about you and use it in ways you don’t want them to. My father was the victim of identity theft from online activity and it literally took him years to recover. Another facet of online safety is risk to your personal mental and emotional health from harmful or even toxic responses to anything you post about yourself. The online world allows for a level of anonymity that lets some people behave without fear of accountability, and as such, people will say rude, offensive, and hurtful things online that they’d never say in person. On a less-obvious level, many of the big tech companies that provide these online tools and applications are tracking all of your online actions and using that data to make money off of you – whether they sell you something or simply sell your personal data to someone else to be used in any way they wish.

Yes, the information age has presented a glorious amount of information to us all – and it’s on each of us to protect ourselves in this figurative ocean and use the tools available to us wisely and efficiently. I close today with a suggestion to choose your online information source carefully. (You’ll want to check out the soon-to-be-released Eos Community Connections Portal, brought to you by an established non-profit company that guarantees it won’t sell your data or allow advertisers to prey on you. The information you’ll find in it is on topic and easy to filter. Only members that have accepted the Good Human Code Of Conduct(™) can post information in Eos, and Eos’ fair and transparent content moderation processes will shield you from mistreatment at the hands of other members.

Coming up next: Online discussion forums.

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Redefining online community Part 3: Resource matching platforms – your “go-to” when you need to find help

2/16/2022

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We all need help sometimes!
The singularly toughest period of my life, in which I faced one major life transition after another, felt like a series of waves crashing over me so quickly that I could barely catch my breath. A painful divorce. The birth of my son the same week the divorce went final. Leaving a job. Starting a new job. Selling a home. Buying a home. The death of a loved one. Seven of the most challenging things I’d ever faced, all hitting within a few months of each other. I wasn’t prepared for all of this – I mean, who gets taught how to navigate this kind of thing? Not knowing where to turn I reached out to family, friends, church, therapists … and in the end, I found that all of them wanted to help, but none of them could truly understand me, much less help me. And so I felt alone; like I needed to figure it all out on my own. And I did, and I learned and I healed and I grew … and I resolved to one day create a “safe port in the storm” to help people understand that they aren’t alone even in those dark times and to help them find the resources they need. Major life transitions sometimes do come at you in waves, and when they do you’ll have to figure out how to navigate more than one major life change at the same time like I did. If you find yourself in that position here are two things I learned that may help: the first is that we’re actually a lot stronger than we know. Our true strength doesn’t reveal itself until we’re tested. The second is that with hope, inspiration, belief in ourselves, and access to resources, we can get through just about anything.

I’ll put it right out there that I brought most of these big changes – and the massive stresses that came with them - on myself. I could’ve made different, safer decisions and chosen an easier, more comfortable path, but doing so would’ve meant taking another big hit of Novocaine for the soul, and accepting a life in which I could never truly be myself. The decisions I made – starting with the gut-wrenching decision to end a marriage that looked idyllic to most – weren’t popular or easy to understand. That first decision set in motion a domino effect that ended up costing me nearly everything that was important to me at the time, but in the long run allowed me to reclaim my soul and become someone I’m proud of today.

Sometimes it’s really hard to find the help you need, when you need it.
When shit hit the fan, my first instinct was to turn to family and friends. I’m blessed with a loving and supporting nuclear family that loves me and wanted to help, so I went to them first. But we lived across the country from them, so they didn’t see the day-to-day things that wore away at what started as a lovely relationship. I found that my decisions and direction were outside of what was considered normal or acceptable in the eyes of my family and church, and so it was hard for me to really open up to them and to not feel judged in some ways. While my ex and I were also blessed with large group of friends, most of them didn’t understand my decisions and vilified me to the extent that I came out with only two friendships intact. In an October 2019 American Psychological Association article titled “Manage stress: Strengthen your support network”, authors Mary Alvord, PhD, Bert Uchino, PhD, and Vaile Wright, PhD, write “Emotional support is an important protective factor for dealing with life’s difficulties. The 2015 survey found the average stress level for those with emotional support was 5.0 out of 10, compared to 6.3 for those without such support.” My experience taught me that family and friends can be an amazing source of support and love during challenging times, but I probably needed to invest more in strengthening those relationships much earlier - and even then, they can’t always see things through your eyes and may not be able to give you the support you need.

I also turned to professionals for help for the first time ever, and admittedly I found it really hard at first. I felt like asking for that kind of help was a weakness and it took some work to overcome the stigma of “working with a shrink.” I’m really glad I did though; there are huge potential benefits of therapy as explained by Sara Lindberg in her October 2020 Healthline.com article. My (ex) wife and I worked with marriage counselors trying to get things back on track, and even though it didn’t work well for us, I learned a lot about myself in the process. When that failed, I sought out another therapist for individual counseling. Once I found someone that I was comfortable with, I did a significant amount of work on my own and again learned a lot about myself in the process. In the end, however, it felt to me like he wanted to figure me out, put a label on my “condition,” and write a prescription to fix it. I disagreed with his course of action and decided to follow my own heart, much to his disapproval, and again felt judged harshly by someone I had turned to for help. I learned from this that therapists and other mental health professionals can teach us a lot about ourselves and give us new tools that can be a huge help in times of need, but also that therapy isn’t for everybody, every therapist isn’t a great fit, and that sometimes the professionals don’t have all the right answers.

Depending on what you’re facing, I think you’ll find there are a plethora of other resources and programs that can help, many of which you can access online. One example is United Way 211, a free and confidential service that helps people across North America find the local resources they need 24/7. Most of the yearly 20 million 211 calls, web chats, and text messages are from people looking for help meeting basic needs like housing, food, transportation, and health care. Another good example is The Life Transition Zone, an online resource-matching service that offers you hope & inspiration through the power of personal story as well as access to local and national resources to help on your journey. Their resources are organized by major life transition, so finding what you need in your area is as simple as choosing the transition you’re facing and then setting filters to narrow down the search results. I find that current resource-matching sites like these can be excellent ways to quickly and privately find what you need, but they’re limited to the resources that are currently listed in their databases and they can also yield an overwhelming amount of information to sort through to find what might work best for you.

A better way!
If you have an existing network of trusted family and friends, that’s a good place to start when looking for help and support. Working with a therapist can also be extremely helpful, if you can connect with one that you’re comfortable with and whose style and skills get you the results you need. Using tools like United Way 211 and The Life Transition Zone may also help you find helpful programs and resources, though they have limitations as well. Recognizing that there should be a better way led me to create a nonprofit company called The Intentional Living Collective years later, and we envision a better tool that anyone can use to find the resources they need, anytime they need them. That tool is being built as a multi-sided platform that will make it very fast and easy to find a breadth of relevant services and programs and then filter through the results to narrow it down to your best options. We’ve prioritized keeping your information secure, our privacy policy ensures your data will never be sold or misused, and our member code of conduct ensures that you can safely share what you want without experiencing rude or hostile responses from other members. There’s a unique “Community Support” feature that makes it easy for like-minded individuals in the community to give help to or get help from each other, and a transparent member-rating system based on feedback from other community members helps you figure out who you want to trust. This resource-matching tool is one of the really cool features you’ll find in our Eos Community Connections Portal when it’s released – stay tuned!

Coming up next: The big world of blogs and podcasts.

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Redefining online community Part 2: Social media with a soul? Yes, please!

2/4/2022

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I’ll just say it - sometimes I really struggle with social media.
Today's popular social media platforms serve such an important function for many of us that about 82% of us (223 million people) in the US regularly used one or more of them in 2020, according to Statista. Datareportal reports that in the third quarter of 2019 there were 3.5 billion social media users across the globe. Despite the societal ills and perils wrought by the most widely used platforms (more on that later), these numbers suggest that social media plays a huge role in the ways we interact and relate to one another in this day and age.

Why are so many people using today’s popular social media platforms even knowing that they may be bad for them? Truthfully there is no universal answer, as the reasons we flock to these platforms vary as widely as the individual identities we bring to them. Many feel isolated and lonely as the pandemic persists, and social media is an easy way to connect with friends and loved ones, no matter how inferior that connection might be as a substitute for IRL interaction. Some fear missing out on the latest pop culture news, social event or meme – a phenomenon commonly known as FOMO. And because developers design these products to draw us in with likes and comments, playing on our dopamine receptors and need for social validation, many are simply addicted.

As both a techie and a skeptic, I know what these platforms are doing to me, and that I probably should have said goodbye to them long ago. And yet I remain plugged in, despite my reservations - what am I so afraid of leaving behind? In her December 2019 Psychology Today article “Can’t Delete: Why We Stay on Social Media,” Bree McEwan Ph.D. writes “Using these platforms can feel like mindless scrolling, but in fact, social media’s ability to make us more aware of our friendships and relationships may keep us tied to our accounts. Further, the author states that for her personally, quitting Facebook and Twitter “… would mean resigning a meaningful volunteer position, losing an avenue for connecting with my scout troop moms, and cutting myself off from a wise and caring network of academic mothers. I would lose connections I have made throughout my nomadic life.” It would also mean “… leaving behind not only the influencers and misinformation memes, but also community group pages, updates from cousins, news of friends over the years, memorial pages of deceased loved ones, and networks of industry colleagues.”
With this in mind, let’s take a look at those who have managed to permanently retire from their newsfeeds, and what alternatives remain for those of us who aren’t quite ready to entirely let go.

So, why are so many people ditching social media?
According to their own data, Facebook’s user base in North America shrunk from 198 million users to 196 million in just one quarter. In an article entitled “This Might Be What Finally Makes Me Quit Facebook in 2021,” journalist Jason Atken hypothesizes why two million people migrated away from the platform in such a short period of time: "There are privacy concerns, data leaks, and incendiary content, not to mention the monetization of your personal data.” Furthermore, Facebook is “… designing its product solely to make it better and more profitable for Facebook, even when that results in a worse user experience.” In general, many are coming to an understanding that the major tech companies play on human psychology and brain chemistry to keep users scrolling and maximize profits. Tristan Harris’ article “How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind – From a Magician and Google Design Ethicist,” gives an in-depth explanation of what they’re doing and how - and if you need convincing that some of these companies are acting in bad faith, you should read it. More and more people are leaving, and as recently as February 2nd, 2022 it was announced that Meta (formerly Facebook) lost over $200B (yes, Billion) in market value.

On top of privacy and psychological concerns, data in “Suicide Risk in Emerging Adulthood: Associations with Screen Time Over 10 Years” by Sarah M. Coyne, et. al, suggests that the negativity and incendiary content that plague these platforms can severely affect peoples’ mental health. In the United States, we are in the midst of a mental health crisis of epic proportions, undoubtedly exacerbated by the negativity we encounter on social media in addition to the isolation wrought by the COVID-19 crisis. People are re-evaluating what and who are important to them, where they want to work and live, what they want to do with their time, and what being in community really means to them. How many times have you seen a friend announce that they're "taking a break" from social media? It happens a lot, and often the user is back on the platform shortly after the announcement. In the words of earlier-mentioned author Bree McEwan Ph.D, “People aren’t making a choice about whether or not to leave a social media platform, they are making a choice about whether to leave their personal social network. Leaving Facebook isn’t about leaving Mark Zuckerberg, it’s about leaving Aunt Rose.” Personally I’d leave Zuckerberg in a hot minute if there was a better alternative, and I think “leaving Aunt Rose” is better than staying connected in an unhealthy, unsatisfying way.

A fresh alternative
So we know that social media platforms are actively harmful to our mental health, but so is social isolation. Where do we go from here? How can we connect in a more mindful, healthy way? In her December 2020 Atlantic article, Adrienne Lafrance wrote that “We need people who dismantle these notions by building alternatives. And we need enough people to care about these other alternatives to break the spell of venture capital and mass attention that fuels megascale and creates fatalism about the web as it is now."
Who are these people and where are they now? Knowing that profit and greed drive the many things wrong with today’s popular social media platforms, how can we trust that an alternative wouldn’t eventually lead us down a similar path? One possible answer is that an established non-profit company or benevolent social enterprise could step up and deliver a fresh, alternative social media platform that doesn’t depend on making money from selling user data or selling advertisements to those users. Their primary goal could be to provide a better way for us to build community, and to give us all a place to connect with other people and organizations in a safer, more authentic way. They’d likely offer up a privacy policy that guarantees they would never sell users’ personal data, and transparently give users the ability to determine which other users could and couldn’t see their personal data. They would not allow annoying advertisements or in-system direct marketing at users. They would commit to not using self-serving algorithms to determine who sees what content and when. They may also create an emotionally safe environment by establishing and enforcing a set of basic, shared community values that all users would have to agree to before posting any viewable content. They’d create a fair and transparent system to ensure that people are held accountable for their words and actions toward other users, and that system would include actual community members to make sure the will of the greater community is heard and enforced.
Hmm, that sounds like an interesting platform, and it would be an ambitious undertaking to say the least! A platform like that wouldn’t be for everyone, but a sizable portion of the crowd currently using social media platforms might welcome the change.

Personally, I’ve had Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and other social media accounts for years. Admittedly, they often feel like an addiction.. For me, online dating apps were even more addictive - I had accounts on three different dating sites/apps until very recently, and I found myself searching sites for possible matches, responding to messages from people I don’t know and likely never will, or swiping one way or the other way too much. I’ve been feeling pretty turned off by it all for months. I’m aware that the time and mental energy I put into it almost every day could be used for much better things. Working on this post inspired me, so I finally decided to pull the plug yesterday. I deleted the dating apps from my phone, and permanently deleted my accounts on all three dating sites. It felt so good to cut those cords that I decided to take it a step further and delete the social media apps from my phone as well. I would like to ultimately delete my personal social media accounts permanently as well, but my business pages are attached to them so I have to figure out how to get them to stand alone before I do. But I will. I’m encouraged by the February 2021 Guardian article “I get better sleep: the people who quit social media,” in which author Soo Youn shares first-hand stories of five people that ditched social media and found that their lives were better for it. I’m betting I’ll feel a lot of the same things these five did and I’ll be happy I did it. For me it isn’t about straight-up ditching social media, it’s about choosing to invest my time and energy in ways that are good for my soul. Plus, I happen to know that an alternative community platform like what Adrienne LaFrance called for - one with a soul - is coming, and its name is Eos. More about that in upcoming posts.

Coming up next: “Resource matching platforms – your “go-to” when you need to find help”.

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Redefining online community Part 4: The wide and deep world of blogs and podcasts

Redefining online community Part 3: Resource matching platforms – your “go-to” when you need to find help

Coming up next: The big world of blogs and podcasts.

Redefining online community Part 2: Social media with a soul? Yes, please!

Cal Loo

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Redefining online community Part 4: The wide and deep world of blogs and podcasts

Redefining online community Part 3: Resource matching platforms – your “go-to” when you need to find help

Coming up next: The big world of blogs and podcasts.​

Redefining online community Part 2: Social media with a soul? Yes, please!

Cal Loo

Archives

Categories

Coming up next: The big world of blogs and podcasts.