Franklin Taggart's Unconventional Life Blog

I've been revisiting Instagram and learning about TikTok in recent weeks. When I joined Instagram, it could only be accessed by phone, and I think I may have been using a flip phone. You took pictures of whatever you were doing, wrote a brief message, and posted. The people who followed you saw it. Simple. I've become a fast fan of TikTok, with the exception of the potential human rights and privacy violations, in large part because their algorithm is really paying attention to my viewing preferences and adding more of what I'm watching to my timeline. All the other channels? Not so much. It is probably because I've only been active on TikTok for a short time, but I don't have any idea how the other platforms choose what to show me. It has made me wonder how I decide what to share. There doesn't seem to be a way to predict what the algorithm or audience will favor, so I'm left to my most reliable guide - my hunch. I believe that our intuition is connected to...

I've been online since 1995. I've seen all kinds of platforms come and go, from Usenet groups to AOL and Yahoo groups, to MySpace, to every iteration of Facebook and Twitter. I'm late to the Instagram and Pinterest game, and I was possessed by the recent success my friend Meridith Grundei has had on TikTok to just take a look. Social media platforms haven't been easy places to build and maintain good quality relationships for the most part. They change too frequently and they seem to benefit by staying more than moderately chaotic. I participate in a few groups where great conversations happen, but other than those, I'd rather spend time elsewhere. I think we need to build our communities so that they're social media proof. I'm not convinced that email is the answer but in the midst of all the commotion, there are pockets of great communities that would be good no matter where they showed up. The Interact Community is the one I mentioned in the Coffee Break....