Journal: A Note on Social Media Topics

site/journal/2024/Note on Social Media Topics.md

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+---
+title: A Note on Social Media Topics
+subtitle: >
+    A quick Friday-evening note on what I do and don’t tend to write about on Bluesky, LinkedIn, Mastodon, etc.—and why!
+
+qualifiers:
+    audience:
+        Other users of social media, especially others who are thinking about how to deal with “context collapse”—and/or folks curious about why I don’t spend a lot of time talking about faith, politics, and so on over on social media.
+
+date: 2024-11-15T19:28:00-0700
+
+tags:
+    - writing
+    - social media
+
+---
+
+On social media platforms (and, to a lesser degree, this site), you will find that I mostly post about tech in the “literally building software” sense, and about music. I generally do *not* post about politics here, and while I am quite open about my faith—if you’ve missed it, I’m a fairly traditional Anglican Christian! But if you’ve been to my blog, I don’t think it’s easy to miss—you won’t see me wading into theological controversies here very often.
+
+The reasons are related, and my choice here comes down to just how *very* mixed my audience is. A bunch of you who read this are literally godless atheist communists, and a bunch of you are extremely conservative Christians, and a bunch of you are wildly random things in between or off on other axes entirely. A few years ago, I wrote a post on this subject, [Assumed Audiences][aa]. Go read it! Really, stop and go read it!
+
+[aa]: https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html
+
+---
+
+Okay, now that you’re back—Here’s the thing:
+
+I can label every post on this site with an “Assumed Audience” and while (as I note in that post) it will not ward off truly determined hate-readers, it at least gives us a fighting chance of having a productive interaction, or at a minimum you just skipping it if you aren’t the intended reader. By contrast, I cannot effectively do that on social media. I mean, I could try, with an Assumed Audience on any given post or thread. But one of the great challenges of social media is context collapse, and context-free interactions and debates. You might see me saying something that makes you furious and upset and angry and shocked… when it’s the kind of thing that I would talk about one way with people “in my group” and another way entirely with people I know vehemently differ with me.
+
+With social media, though—especially microblogging, but equally true, by and large, of longer-form posts on LinkedIn, and to some degree even on this site and even with Assumed Audience headers… context collapse is still in force.
+
+So if you want to talk about gender issues or politics or whether the Christian claims about reality make any sense or what ordination means or what it looks like to keep a properly theocentric view of the liturgy or how I think about the intersection of art and faith: Great! But not on social media, and only rarely here! Some of that material ends up on this site, some of it in other forums—from tech conference talks to Christian journals. A lot of it, though, ends up in 1-on-1 conversations where I can speak in a way appropriate to the person I am talking to, rather than some impossible totally-general crowd.
+
+I have adopted this stance precisely because I value very deeply the ability to have those conversations, because those conversations matter, and most of them are basically impossible to have in the context of social media and microblogging specifically. (The medium being message and all that.) That stance has served me well. I have had any number of *profoundly* challenging conversations over the years, where the parties involved differed about basically everything down to the nature of reality itself (not exaggerating!), in part because I do not play in that space on social media, and relatively little even on my website.
+
+That choice means that when we are talking about those things, we can talk to each other like real people—because we will be confronted by the reality of flesh and blood sitting there at a table in the same space. We will not be experiencing each other as merely a picture and some text, easily slotted into the categories of our previous experiences of too many such (far too heated) discussions.
+
+Now, this is *my* judgment about this medium, because of my own specific context and very weird mix of audiences. Your own balance on this point may look different—indeed, probably *should* look different. But please take that context collapse into account; keep clear when it’s time to go offline!
+
+I will gladly buy you a coffee, a beer, some tea, a sparkling water, etc. and talk about *any* of those things with you—up to and including the eternal fate of our souls before the living God, because yes I really am a serious Christian!—any time in person. For real. Take me up on it. In person.