End of an era.... Xitter no more

When you find yourself tweeting/retweeting like I did this morning the very real evidence of civilizational collapse all around us, maybe it’s time to do something different with those minutes and hours and days.

Today I closed my last Xitter account after 17 years of daily use.

SEVENTEEN YEARS!

I’ve had a few accounts, but this was the holdout account and it’s formed the content of my KIP sensemaking framework for the past five years. (That’s okay, it’s just the end of a chapter since the framework and the data still exist and can used, and await other editors, curators, contributors, and researchers.)

Closing this particular social media account and ending my association with that platform is a great loss for me since it’s been my lifeline. I’ve just closed the channel of the best news and opinion I’ve ever enjoyed with carefully vetted powerhouse lists and follows of the best civic participators and my custom search and consumption practices that have consistently generated sharp, expert, early insights into current events.

It was my lifeline to the best news and opinion I’ve ever enjoyed due to my carefully vetted powerhouse lists, follows, and my custom search and consumption practices that have consistently generated sharp, expert, early insights into current events.

I’ll just head over to LInkedin…where I see we’ve breached 7 of 9 planetary boundaries, we’re past the point of national-scale mitigation. The dire immensity of this moment is a lot to take in.

However I’m eager to partake in the different pursuits that open up for me with the new-found time and attention. Especially because community resilience, local survival plans, and protecting each other is the only way forward.

Until we learn to be better information consumers, we'll keep falling for disinformation

The day after the 2024 US Election.

Related data points in my timeline:

A certain personality type is found to most readily fall for poor information.

Also, news- information- digital- and media-literacy are teachable and learnable.

We need to help people be better information citizens.

That fact has never been clearer. It’ll help people be better voters, better neighbors, and better able to collectively work on our biggest issues, all the way to the climate crisis. It’s why I keep looking for ways to bring KIP, my passion project of the past 9 years, to the world.

Click on any of the tags below to see my previous posts on these topics which millions are now waking up to today. Click on the headline of each post to open it and see continue clicking on the tags in each post to dive deeper.

What should journalism do to reveal the state of our democracy?

Here come the CONTENT CREATORS - 400 million impressions at the Democratic National Convention

I feel quite vindicated this month. The central contention of KIP, my passion project of the past decade, is hitting the mainstream. Everybody sees it!

A journalism society talked about feeling insulted this week. Meanwhile, journalists in the mainstream media had their lunch eaten last week by 200 ‘social media influencers’ invited to the Democratic National Convention who reached 400 million impressions (4x what cable news generated) for a media value of $800 million.

What a masterclass in disinter-media-tion. The Democrats went straight to the people.

The mainstream ‘journalism’ hits keep coming, with Dana Bash of CNN recycling racist Trump taunts as if it’s legitimate journalistic work in the first cable news mainstream media interview of the HARRIS WALZ team. Don’t waste our time!

I cannot help but notice these are the very same social media contributors I've been talking about as the non-traditional bridge media we need to connect to traditional journalism, and I conceived a framework to do that with my passion project KIP.

Journalists, it’s long past time for you to stop feeling insulted and get to work connecting with the people who are bringing news to us. They could use your rigor and training and experience, and we will all benefit from it. Democracy demands it.

By the way, I have a plan for that. Take a look at the KIP framework to connect journalists with content creators (I call them the Fifth Estate) and trusted independent parties to vet, frame, and generate discussion, games, research, education and commerce using current events.

The bigger picture, in your words

With my KIP project to make sense in the social age and surface the best civic participators - or members of “the Fifth Estate”, - I’ve been collecting the contributions on Twitter.

For a couple years I made graphic images of quotes I spied. I put some of them together into a larger narrative of our time, and this moment. Take a look!

Below is a short version of the narrative in the video. See the video for quote credits or read the transcript with credits here.

“The Bigger Picture” In Snippets From Emergent News Contributors Curated By KIP

Is your foot on the brake at the same time you're trying to accelerate? It’s your brain science

New read for Fogust...

I was fortunate to read an early manuscript of this new book release by ☀️ Jessica J.J. Lutz ☀️ and look forward to diving into the final version now making its way around the world!

I see Barbie gets a mention on p 110 - she was Jessica's favored doll because she wasn't a baby, she was a grown woman who knew what she wanted - Jessica and I were among the (how many, uncounted?) girls whose parents wouldn't allow us to play with the toy. Before Barbie director Greta Gerwig was even born, Barbie was a subversive force in our lives!

“A war correspondent facing burnout wonders why she suddenly feels fear when a bomb goes off at her Baghdad hotel: a clue comes when she realizes she is 4 months pregnant. To understand how her coping mechanisms no longer work, she applied her journalistic research skills to the inner conflict she experienced, and her upbringing. What comes out of it is a deep dive into the gender-based sociology, and the brain science, a review of the literature parsing it all, and a way forward, through simple exercises that anyone can do to start using our dual-sided human brain to succeed in life and work, and stay healthy and feel good about it too.”

— How I encapsulated the book on an early read.

Here’s where you can get the book in the USA: Amazon.