I’d be much more interested in reading Cal Newport’s wife’s book about how she unplugged.
Ha! This is basically how I feel about Cal Newport. And I don’t even have kids 😂
This article was making me think more about why women aren’t as involved in the IndieWeb, and how to get more women involved. From the standpoint that a lot of mom duties are reliant on social media, seems like your best bet is to focus more on women who aren’t mothers – probably women in college and in their twenties.
What’s the value proposition of a personal website for that age group? I don’t know a lot of younger people so I’m not sure how things have changed since I was in college (yikes fifteen years ago), when every artist had their own portfolio website so it felt like you needed one too if you were in art or design. Now you can just run an Instagram, or set up a Behance portfolio or probably some other cooler website. After graduating, I blogged my internship so I’d have something fresh online if anyone looked me up. Today people have LinkedIn to put themselves out there for hiring. (I obviously still think it’s valuable to have your own site under your control, but I’m not 24 😁)
I think deeper connection is the answer here. When you graduate college, you and your friends go your separate ways. Facebook and Instagram give you the semblance of staying connected but without the frequent interaction of college you drift apart – and making new friends is much harder after college. So a better way to stay in touch and communicate could be compelling, especially to a savvy group aware of the damage social media can cause to young women.
Or, you go all in on the mommy blogger / lifestyle blogger scene and try to get everyone hooked up with webmentions to port the whole community over to a new system. For example, Emily Henderson’s blog still gets (lots of) rich threaded comments. The challenge there is that people congregate around the main blog, and probably a lot of commenters don’t have websites of their own. Do people commenting see a value to having their own website when they’re maintaining a community well enough through the comments on someone else’s blog? Community alone probably isn’t enough of a selling point.
Plus, what’s the value to Emily Henderson’s business in supporting webmentions and promoting her followers joining the IndieWeb and using its tools? (Besides the goodness of her heart and wanting to support an alternative system.) More lifestyle bloggers is more competition.
Another place I see lots of women is cooking blogs – just look at the invaluable comment section on Smitten Kitchen where each recipe has dozens of people who’ve shared the changes they made to the recipe, how it turned out, and what they’d change next time. That style of commenting realistically works better for webmentions than more threaded replies – and is a more demonstrably useful reason to have your own blog, so all your recipe notes are in one spot on your own blog as well as on displayed as a webmention on the original website 🤔 Yeah, cooking blogs seem like an audience who could benefit from the IndieWeb.
7 replies on “Overcoming the societal expectations making it hard for women to leave social media”
Overcoming the societal expectations making it hard for women to leave social media by Tracy Durnell
As somebody who is interested in starting the meetup for IndieWeb/personal sites, I found the thinking about the ‘selling’ point of the IndieWeb interesting. I would never have thought of the cooking community as the one to target.
Even though I started having my own blog on my domain in my student times, I never considered the students as the main public for personal websites. The main reason being, that there is a constant present assumption, that everybody is on Facebook.
When I started a cognitive science master program, the professor asked us to agree on the way we will disseminate the information among ourselves, and one minute later the Facebook group was created – since everybody was already there. Without any discussion about it.
Well, I was one of the handful people, that were ushered in creating Facebook account – which I deleted, once I stopped attending classes, since I no longer needed.
Just last week their was a regular cognitive science students meetup (still on their mailing list, even though I finished my last class 3 years ago). I had an interesting conversation with two cognitive science students at the (one will apply next year, one current). After the fact, one of them put out a phone to get my contact information. As she started to scroll through the names, I asked, where is she searching? I did stop her, when I saw her press a Facebook icon.
During undergraduate studies, I had a couple of people, that were always happy to take my invitation, but they never invited me to anything. When I asked them about it, the most frequent answer was, that I was not on Facebook. So when they were looking for people to hang out, I was not on the list they checked.
But maybe I should be looking at how I was convinced to start a blog. I remember sitting in the Le Petit cafe after a Toastmasters meeting. I had a discussion with a another Toastmasters member “Hope he does not mind me linking to him”. The discussion went from a lot of different topic. But on the topic of personal sites, I think the argument that convinced me was learning in public. I think there was, maybe, also some talk about socialization or marketing? I can not remember, since these were not the ones convincing to me.
Took me a some time, but I eventually bought the cheapest domain (.eu was on sale at the time) and the cheapest hosting in the local firm as an experiment. I found the experiment successful.
But then, he is a master of convincing people and I was both not on social media and not convinced in the positives of social media, so not sure how applicable this strategy would be to other people.
I am also a technical personal, that does not care, if I am the only female in the group – I am used to this.
I know of at least one personal case, when the person asked me who many women will be present at the meetup before going, so this might also be the factor.
Definitely something, where I need to think some more about.
This Article was mentioned on tracydurnell.com
What do I want the future of the Internet to look like? Last updated 2024 May 19 | More of my big questions Sub-questions What do I want out of the Internet? What’s a better way to use the Internet? How can I support the independent web? What are the social norms around blogging and…
Read Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most by Greg McKeown
I like the framework he presents here, and the foundational idea that we’re all working harder than we need to be. It’s structured in three simple, stackable pieces, subdivided by chapters on subthemes. Each section concludes with a (bit too lengthy IMO) summary.
Something about this book felt… hollow? to me, despite the appealing framework that’s designed for ease of reading. The ideas are well organized, if somewhat commonsense, but the execution could have used more oomph. He gives only one example in most chapters, and frankly not people I can relate to (CEOs and pro ballplayers come to mind). That isn’t enough evidence to convince me, nor often enough tangible to take away and use. Some chapters were better than others about this. It reminds me of Seth Godin, but not quite pulling it off? If I’m remembering correctly, Indistractable also followed a similar style, so this may simply be the way one publishes a self-help book today.
Some of the examples were poorly chosen, I suspect, and to me already dated the book (Elon Musk / Tesla and the DoNotPay guy who’s currently facing some class action lawsuits). That’s rooted in another flaw of the book: its intended audience seems to be business bros who care about the dudes who own Berkshire Hathaway (another example). This roots it in the privileged perspective of managers, who have power over their actions, and in the toxic individualistic perspective of people trying to achieve and succeed on their own, rather than team players who see that part of their work is to help their colleagues. I’ve had the same complaint about Cal Newport — when you don’t answer your colleague’s emails, you’re saying that your work and attention is more valuable than theirs.
This book is still centered in the ideology of individual success, without much regard for the impacts and limitations of systems and hierarchies. Some problems can be simplified, yes, but some truly are complex or out of your influence. Tara McMullin’s What Works is better about acknowledging that politics and neurodiversity and sexism exist.
The conclusion reveals he’s come to this mentality through managing his family’s health struggles. It struck me as odd to hold that for the end. I didn’t feel it tied this philosophy together enough, but also felt that this crucial piece of the story was withheld upfront. (Either that or I’ve forgotten about it over the past two weeks?)
It’s been so long since I read Essentialism that I can’t say how this fits with that work. I remember Essentialism being better.
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