I'm all the way in with this topic in general, but I have to admit that one of my guilty pleasures is reading decisions from the US Supreme Court. Even with opinions I disagree with, I just love the direct and thorough writing style (in contrast with the "legalese" permeating so much of legal agreements and contracts). I'm not sure why there's such a divergence there, maybe it's well-understood by people in the field, but there you go. There are even cases where Justices take potshots at each other in their dissents -- the one that comes to mind is the Heller (2008) case regarding individual gun rights. Downright entertaining! :)
That's a really good point! I'm lumping all forms of legal writing together here, basically out of ignorance of all their flavours - so, how much did the authors of the study acknowledge that entire spectrum? (I often see hilariously precise legal quotations going viral on Twitter for the reasons you state - absolutely Masterclasses in cold laser-like fury. But also the comedy pieces too, where lots of fun is being had with the language...
On reflection, it's like saying "science papers are impenetrable". There are lots of types of science paper, and of the writers writing them!
I'm thinking that maybe at some point this newsletter is going to end up on a legal language bulletin board, and hordes of lawyers are going to descend and point-by-point eviscerate me like a pathologist performing an autopsy, and then I'll have to send out another correction email. 😀
Because reasons, I once had to read (in painstaking detail) the lease for my flat. I came across a sentence I simply couldn't understand. Once you'd removed all the notwithstandings and peradventures and heretofores and so on, it basically said something on the lines of "this shall apply only if this thing but also only if this other, completely opposite thing". Thinking I just wasn't clever enough to understand it, I called a solicitor friend (also a cricket team-mate, and therefore not as relentlessly on the clock as he might have been). I read him the sentence. "Does that make any sense?" "Nope. Classic lease language, written by someone who has no idea what the eff they're writing. That'll be forty guineas." (I bought him a pint the next Sunday, in lieu.)
😆 Glorious. That's like something out of Yes Minister/-Prime Minister. I guess that's every profession - I worked briefly in the civil service (in I.T.) and I saw plenty of documents where the author was either actively bamboozling, or was just doing that thing we Brits do so well, where it's just the done thing, old man, it's always been this way, stop complaining, chin up and get it done, you're missing the point, dear boy, it's not actually meant to be READ, what?
But then, I really love discovering a word or phrase where you realise everyone uses it, yet nobody actually knows what it means. Fills me with delight. (A bit like the American "I could care less", which David Mitchell ranted about nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw)
So I wouldn't want *everything* to make sense. That would be so BORING. (And I suspect none of us would have much to write about.)
"On the one hand: of course they need to create a standard for experiment purposes, and on the other, what the actual eff is this thing." 😂
What a fun read, Mike!
Honestly, after plowing through John Locke and William Blackstone for the Land Ownership circle on Threadable, I really do start to wonder how lawyers and certain kinds of philosophers have survived for so long. In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, they would have landed on a planet where a swamp mattress would have oomped them or something.
I suspect you're feeling about Locke and Blackstone the way I felt about Burke - that mix of "you could have used a twentieth of these words and still said the same thing, sir" and "you can't just make a sweeping statement like that!!! Unpack it!". And I had no idea how much of it was down to context, to us not being the intended audience, and to all the history of the ideas between then and now that have programmed us to tend to think in certain ways, instead of being down to Burke being a Windbag Of A Certain Age who loved the sound of his own quill...
I know a few folk currently and formerly in the legal profession, and - generalising wildly, it's always seems clear to me that it's a calling that requires a certain type of brain, and that I don't have it! I'm mostly a broad, sweeping shapes-that-make-the-big-picture type of person, and I have a speculative turn of ideas where possibilities light me up, and I realised this when I was working as an okay story editor and an absolutely crummy line editor. That's what I feel good at, and that's mostly where my biases and failings are. So to be able to wrestle with the smallest details and to deal with such a vast, seemingly unprocessable quantity of How The World Currently Is - it feels like certain types of journalism that I suspect I'd also be rubbish at...
So when I read Locke, or Kant, I feel like they're playing a different game, and I don't quite get the rules? They're using language to nail down ideas with...nails made of stuff I didn't know you could make nails from?
(Side note: welcome to my very worst analogy-descriptive writing in any comment I've ever written. You're welcome.)
But generally, I found it such hard going. I found perhaps the same kind of thing you're feeling about Locke when I was reading Burke - just an absolute brick wall of comprehension with no ladder to be found. So I wonder - and this is me being, as usual, tiresomely upbeat in my speculative notions - that most of everyone wants to learn how to write with amazing clarity, and when you see someone not quite doing that, it's a quiet tragedy - whatever profession they're in. (I remember something about Kant feeling like he'd have had more of an influence on the world if he could write more clearly.)
And that includes modern lawyers, who have the *added* challenge of having to get everything pretty much bang-on correct the first time it goes to print, or at least workably so. And that's the point where I know I could never work in law, because of how much grammatical and structural clearing-up-after-myself I have to do all the time because I'm just dashing madly forward with my half-baked notions, tripping over things and spilling letters everywhere and not giving a damn...
Does this comment have a point? It probably needs rewriting by someone who can write. But: I dunno, I'm not sure I'd personally put anyone on the Golgafrinchan Ark "B". Or if I did, they'd be very specific individuals (Captain Nigel Farage, for example). 😁Let the Mutant Star Goat eat them for who they are, not what they do.
This is actually a very good description! I don't know, my experience of reading Burke was different. With him, in your Threadable circle, I definitely felt that wish that I understood the context he was writing in, whom he was addressing. With Locke and Blackstone, I felt more of an abject horror. Literally these writings formed the basis of and justification for a property system that has caused untold awfulness, and there's no there-there. They both admit outright that nobody knows where ownership came from, and once I learned about who their patrons were and what kind of offices they held, it felt really clear that they wrote this stuff in order to make their class and bosses happy. It's the emptiness of it combined with what it's helped to wreck that really got me. "This is why people like us need to be in charge and own everything no matter how much suffering it causes but probably it won't cause suffering because we said that it shouldn't." And then use like 1000 more words to say much the same thing.
Kant is an entirely different story, and wow that ladder missing is a great description! You can turn it inside-out and upside-down and it's still heavy going.
So perhaps, yes, no putting whole classes of people in Golgafrinchan's Ark "B." But maybe a lot of those people weren't meant to be doing those useless jobs anyway. (The one I never understood was hairdressers. Not everything done with hair is useful, but in general it doesn't seem like the most pointless job!) Maybe they would like to be doing other things, given the chance, including lawyers. Like that demolition crew head or whoever he was who was a distant descendant of Genghis Khan and got headaches hearing the clashes of armies in his head while trying to persuade Arthur Dent to let them knock his house down.
This comment has no point, either! I like clear language. I am a good copy editor (not of my own work) and an okay line editor but not necessarily a great "big picture" editor. I think in law I would have enjoyed the writing and research and not the rest of it that involved arguing. And especially winning. I'm not very good at winning. 😅
YIKES on that background for Locke and Blackstone - and that's the context I was lacking, to make sense of it all. Oratory as justification being made to elites, rather than a good-faith, even-handed exploration of the ideas at hand. ALLLLLLLways look at who is sponsoring the thing. And that's the "political" side of this stuff that always needs discussing, even though I guess it's got more to do with power and class than straightforward political affiliations, although let's face it, that's what politics often boils down to...
So - ghagh. Right. When we're reading these and thinking "I'm not the target audience, here in the distant future" it's easy to think "THEY were the target audience, The People Of [That Year]". But almost always they weren't, in the wider sense. usually nobody read that stuff except the powerful, and it was written to bolster the power of the writer, via persuasion of the powerful.
It's a bit like the early maps and travelogues of the world commissioned by incredibly wealthy rulers - it's nice to think "oh, they're making something for the good of mankind" but in reality, it's (arguably) Ibn Battuta setting up a comfortable retirement for himself using the maximum allowable narrative embellishment he can get away with (or Ibn Juzayy, his translator/scribe, is doing that, or they're both in cahoots....) - and it's the ruler of Morocco who financed the write-up trying to consolidate some prestige for himself rather than "for the good of mankind" - and so on.
And I guess there's a thing that the world is a little better at, these days. If you write a book in 17thC England titled "A SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM OF THE UNSIGHTLY UNHELPFULNESS OF TREES AND WHY THE LAND SHOULD BE UTTERLY SHORN OF THEM," you had no legal obligation to add "SPONSORED BY THE BRITISH SOCIETY OF WHIG LUMBERJACKS"? (I think?)
(It's very frustrating when folk react badly to these kinds of modern reappraisals of historical works, including legal and constitutional ones. This rethinking of people's motivations is anti-dogmatic-stupidity at work. And rethinking is such a useful exercise! Even if it turns out to be wrong. Adam Grant's latest book is called "Think Again" and it's about the value of rethinking all the things. Extremely wise arguments made, as far as I've read into it...)
This is such a good summation I don't have anything to add to it! Though I think the SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM of trees was probably sponsored by Weyerhaeuser. ;)
But:
"it's (arguably) Ibn Battuta setting up a comfortable retirement for himself using the maximum allowable narrative embellishment he can get away with (or Ibn Juzayy, his translator/scribe, is doing that, or they're both in cahoots....) - and it's the ruler of Morocco who financed the write-up trying to consolidate some prestige for himself"
I want to know more about these people! At some point. You know. In your spare time.
I enjoyed this. I worked for at least six lawyers in the dark days of having to wear a suit and I have to tell you that their biggest crime was..crime. They were all thoroughly or partially bent. Some went for the biggee - raiding the client account and scarpering to Venezuela - or getting caught before they could. A Scottish one, now he was perfect. Offers for houses in Scotland are sent to the solicitor as sealed bids. His mate wanted one so he opens the sealed bids, gets his mate to up the ante and bingo, the mate gets the property. Another one had me working in an office where all I did was to sit there and do an hour's work each day. Nobody came through the door. I packed him in because he didn't pay me. It was an obvious scam but I never figured out what it was. Another one had a partner - single practitioners are largely shunned. This partner would come in for an hour, two or three days a week and did nothing. Nada. He was also a drunk. I remember it well because he told us of the attacks on the Twin Towers and frankly, nobody gave it credence. I also worked for one who was as mad as a Lloydloom garden chair. Only God knows the tangled web of legal catastrophes I left behind because the partners left me to do the tedious stuff like conveyancing. On one occasion I was mocked up as the boss in order to deal with a difficult client. I never actually pretended to be the boss, but a good suit and a nice voice works wonders. How they ever understood the legal jargon is beyond me. Not one of them was really a first rate brain.
Yes humor it's a magical thing medically speaking and all other. Small towns, disadvantaged communities are rife with it. Humor is the armor and hold against despair. The Scots and Irish are prime examples of the weight of humor in communication & community. Now Lawyers and laws, yes they love words and are keen observers from my experience. I wrote about the Amber Vs DEP parade a while ago. Guilt Vs Innocence is not the winning note. The 'prize' is awarded to the team who swayed ' believable' proof. This fact gleamed from a Criminal Lawyer of my accaintance. All spelling errors and grammar sticks aside, as happens when texting on phone to lend comments.
It's a tricky one! And honestly, I don't have any real answers for social media as a whole. (I'd suggest reading Jenny Odell's "How To Do Nothing" for a bunch of really smart thoughts about using any social media platform - but that's as much as I've got, really.)
But I'm tackling Notes the same way I tackled Twitter in early 2021, when I realised it could be useful for gathering an audience for my newsletter. That presented a problem, because I HATED Twitter. I had around 6,500 followers on there, followed about 2,000 people, and everyone seemed to be cynical and angry and yelling and miserable and - above all - shouting about stuff I didn't care about.
So I decided to stop reacting. Yes, maybe leaving comments here and there, but - mainly, I wanted to carve out a place around my account that talked about the stuff that I felt enthusiastic about.
If you're just reacting on social media, and what you're reacting to makes you depressed and angry, then engaging *more* with that stuff (eg more efficiently) is just going to make you feel worse. And I already felt really, really bad. So I thought, "Nope, if it means I'm making myself irrelevant and out of touch, so be it - I'm just going to focus on what lights me up, and try to tune out most of the rest, especially the pointless angry nonsense coming from demonstrably terrible people who just wanted to annoy everyone enough to get attention."
So I started doing my sciencey Twitter threads - and that's when I found the people I wanted to hang out with.
So - who do YOU want to hang out with on Notes? And what if hanging out with them is partly dependent on what YOU post, not what they are posting? What if part of your purpose on Notes was to act as a lighthouse for the people you want to surround yourself with, by showing up again and again with the kinds of things those people would love to learn more about? Who are those people, where are they right now, and what would guide them towards you?
These are questions I keep asking myself and trying to answer, and I think *that* process is why my social media presence is helping my newsletter grow right now, and it's also feeling like a lot of fun to wrestle with.
Mike, I took pics of this comment to save in my phone. Thank you for such a thoughtful response. For a science guy, you really know how to throw in a workable metaphor. The lighthouse- love that in so many ways. My post on Sunday includes two things that are lighting me up right now- giving me hope about the kind of work that can make us kinder- how we might build bridges instead of shouting across the divide etc. I’m still having fun with audio. I had a few hiccups with this last one- my dog kept sabotaging but that kind of only added to the joy. Grateful!
Our science students study dog poop, and each year we are asked to share samples. Feel like they could be future winners. Going to share this post with the teacher in charge of all that. Not loving notes- feels like way too much noise. Not feeling like the benefits will outweigh the downside, but I appreciate your optimism as always.
As a writer and editor, Including editor of some lawyerly columns, I can attest to the truth that, well, sometimes their phrasings are supremely confounding. One word that I always excise: "promulgate." Yikes!
I'm all the way in with this topic in general, but I have to admit that one of my guilty pleasures is reading decisions from the US Supreme Court. Even with opinions I disagree with, I just love the direct and thorough writing style (in contrast with the "legalese" permeating so much of legal agreements and contracts). I'm not sure why there's such a divergence there, maybe it's well-understood by people in the field, but there you go. There are even cases where Justices take potshots at each other in their dissents -- the one that comes to mind is the Heller (2008) case regarding individual gun rights. Downright entertaining! :)
That's a really good point! I'm lumping all forms of legal writing together here, basically out of ignorance of all their flavours - so, how much did the authors of the study acknowledge that entire spectrum? (I often see hilariously precise legal quotations going viral on Twitter for the reasons you state - absolutely Masterclasses in cold laser-like fury. But also the comedy pieces too, where lots of fun is being had with the language...
On reflection, it's like saying "science papers are impenetrable". There are lots of types of science paper, and of the writers writing them!
I'm thinking that maybe at some point this newsletter is going to end up on a legal language bulletin board, and hordes of lawyers are going to descend and point-by-point eviscerate me like a pathologist performing an autopsy, and then I'll have to send out another correction email. 😀
Because reasons, I once had to read (in painstaking detail) the lease for my flat. I came across a sentence I simply couldn't understand. Once you'd removed all the notwithstandings and peradventures and heretofores and so on, it basically said something on the lines of "this shall apply only if this thing but also only if this other, completely opposite thing". Thinking I just wasn't clever enough to understand it, I called a solicitor friend (also a cricket team-mate, and therefore not as relentlessly on the clock as he might have been). I read him the sentence. "Does that make any sense?" "Nope. Classic lease language, written by someone who has no idea what the eff they're writing. That'll be forty guineas." (I bought him a pint the next Sunday, in lieu.)
😆 Glorious. That's like something out of Yes Minister/-Prime Minister. I guess that's every profession - I worked briefly in the civil service (in I.T.) and I saw plenty of documents where the author was either actively bamboozling, or was just doing that thing we Brits do so well, where it's just the done thing, old man, it's always been this way, stop complaining, chin up and get it done, you're missing the point, dear boy, it's not actually meant to be READ, what?
But then, I really love discovering a word or phrase where you realise everyone uses it, yet nobody actually knows what it means. Fills me with delight. (A bit like the American "I could care less", which David Mitchell ranted about nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw)
So I wouldn't want *everything* to make sense. That would be so BORING. (And I suspect none of us would have much to write about.)
"On the one hand: of course they need to create a standard for experiment purposes, and on the other, what the actual eff is this thing." 😂
What a fun read, Mike!
Honestly, after plowing through John Locke and William Blackstone for the Land Ownership circle on Threadable, I really do start to wonder how lawyers and certain kinds of philosophers have survived for so long. In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, they would have landed on a planet where a swamp mattress would have oomped them or something.
Thank you! :)
I suspect you're feeling about Locke and Blackstone the way I felt about Burke - that mix of "you could have used a twentieth of these words and still said the same thing, sir" and "you can't just make a sweeping statement like that!!! Unpack it!". And I had no idea how much of it was down to context, to us not being the intended audience, and to all the history of the ideas between then and now that have programmed us to tend to think in certain ways, instead of being down to Burke being a Windbag Of A Certain Age who loved the sound of his own quill...
I know a few folk currently and formerly in the legal profession, and - generalising wildly, it's always seems clear to me that it's a calling that requires a certain type of brain, and that I don't have it! I'm mostly a broad, sweeping shapes-that-make-the-big-picture type of person, and I have a speculative turn of ideas where possibilities light me up, and I realised this when I was working as an okay story editor and an absolutely crummy line editor. That's what I feel good at, and that's mostly where my biases and failings are. So to be able to wrestle with the smallest details and to deal with such a vast, seemingly unprocessable quantity of How The World Currently Is - it feels like certain types of journalism that I suspect I'd also be rubbish at...
So when I read Locke, or Kant, I feel like they're playing a different game, and I don't quite get the rules? They're using language to nail down ideas with...nails made of stuff I didn't know you could make nails from?
(Side note: welcome to my very worst analogy-descriptive writing in any comment I've ever written. You're welcome.)
But generally, I found it such hard going. I found perhaps the same kind of thing you're feeling about Locke when I was reading Burke - just an absolute brick wall of comprehension with no ladder to be found. So I wonder - and this is me being, as usual, tiresomely upbeat in my speculative notions - that most of everyone wants to learn how to write with amazing clarity, and when you see someone not quite doing that, it's a quiet tragedy - whatever profession they're in. (I remember something about Kant feeling like he'd have had more of an influence on the world if he could write more clearly.)
And that includes modern lawyers, who have the *added* challenge of having to get everything pretty much bang-on correct the first time it goes to print, or at least workably so. And that's the point where I know I could never work in law, because of how much grammatical and structural clearing-up-after-myself I have to do all the time because I'm just dashing madly forward with my half-baked notions, tripping over things and spilling letters everywhere and not giving a damn...
Does this comment have a point? It probably needs rewriting by someone who can write. But: I dunno, I'm not sure I'd personally put anyone on the Golgafrinchan Ark "B". Or if I did, they'd be very specific individuals (Captain Nigel Farage, for example). 😁Let the Mutant Star Goat eat them for who they are, not what they do.
Bread nails? Aluminium nails? Dry twig nails?
This is actually a very good description! I don't know, my experience of reading Burke was different. With him, in your Threadable circle, I definitely felt that wish that I understood the context he was writing in, whom he was addressing. With Locke and Blackstone, I felt more of an abject horror. Literally these writings formed the basis of and justification for a property system that has caused untold awfulness, and there's no there-there. They both admit outright that nobody knows where ownership came from, and once I learned about who their patrons were and what kind of offices they held, it felt really clear that they wrote this stuff in order to make their class and bosses happy. It's the emptiness of it combined with what it's helped to wreck that really got me. "This is why people like us need to be in charge and own everything no matter how much suffering it causes but probably it won't cause suffering because we said that it shouldn't." And then use like 1000 more words to say much the same thing.
Kant is an entirely different story, and wow that ladder missing is a great description! You can turn it inside-out and upside-down and it's still heavy going.
So perhaps, yes, no putting whole classes of people in Golgafrinchan's Ark "B." But maybe a lot of those people weren't meant to be doing those useless jobs anyway. (The one I never understood was hairdressers. Not everything done with hair is useful, but in general it doesn't seem like the most pointless job!) Maybe they would like to be doing other things, given the chance, including lawyers. Like that demolition crew head or whoever he was who was a distant descendant of Genghis Khan and got headaches hearing the clashes of armies in his head while trying to persuade Arthur Dent to let them knock his house down.
This comment has no point, either! I like clear language. I am a good copy editor (not of my own work) and an okay line editor but not necessarily a great "big picture" editor. I think in law I would have enjoyed the writing and research and not the rest of it that involved arguing. And especially winning. I'm not very good at winning. 😅
YIKES on that background for Locke and Blackstone - and that's the context I was lacking, to make sense of it all. Oratory as justification being made to elites, rather than a good-faith, even-handed exploration of the ideas at hand. ALLLLLLLways look at who is sponsoring the thing. And that's the "political" side of this stuff that always needs discussing, even though I guess it's got more to do with power and class than straightforward political affiliations, although let's face it, that's what politics often boils down to...
So - ghagh. Right. When we're reading these and thinking "I'm not the target audience, here in the distant future" it's easy to think "THEY were the target audience, The People Of [That Year]". But almost always they weren't, in the wider sense. usually nobody read that stuff except the powerful, and it was written to bolster the power of the writer, via persuasion of the powerful.
It's a bit like the early maps and travelogues of the world commissioned by incredibly wealthy rulers - it's nice to think "oh, they're making something for the good of mankind" but in reality, it's (arguably) Ibn Battuta setting up a comfortable retirement for himself using the maximum allowable narrative embellishment he can get away with (or Ibn Juzayy, his translator/scribe, is doing that, or they're both in cahoots....) - and it's the ruler of Morocco who financed the write-up trying to consolidate some prestige for himself rather than "for the good of mankind" - and so on.
And I guess there's a thing that the world is a little better at, these days. If you write a book in 17thC England titled "A SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM OF THE UNSIGHTLY UNHELPFULNESS OF TREES AND WHY THE LAND SHOULD BE UTTERLY SHORN OF THEM," you had no legal obligation to add "SPONSORED BY THE BRITISH SOCIETY OF WHIG LUMBERJACKS"? (I think?)
(It's very frustrating when folk react badly to these kinds of modern reappraisals of historical works, including legal and constitutional ones. This rethinking of people's motivations is anti-dogmatic-stupidity at work. And rethinking is such a useful exercise! Even if it turns out to be wrong. Adam Grant's latest book is called "Think Again" and it's about the value of rethinking all the things. Extremely wise arguments made, as far as I've read into it...)
This is such a good summation I don't have anything to add to it! Though I think the SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM of trees was probably sponsored by Weyerhaeuser. ;)
But:
"it's (arguably) Ibn Battuta setting up a comfortable retirement for himself using the maximum allowable narrative embellishment he can get away with (or Ibn Juzayy, his translator/scribe, is doing that, or they're both in cahoots....) - and it's the ruler of Morocco who financed the write-up trying to consolidate some prestige for himself"
I want to know more about these people! At some point. You know. In your spare time.
I enjoyed this. I worked for at least six lawyers in the dark days of having to wear a suit and I have to tell you that their biggest crime was..crime. They were all thoroughly or partially bent. Some went for the biggee - raiding the client account and scarpering to Venezuela - or getting caught before they could. A Scottish one, now he was perfect. Offers for houses in Scotland are sent to the solicitor as sealed bids. His mate wanted one so he opens the sealed bids, gets his mate to up the ante and bingo, the mate gets the property. Another one had me working in an office where all I did was to sit there and do an hour's work each day. Nobody came through the door. I packed him in because he didn't pay me. It was an obvious scam but I never figured out what it was. Another one had a partner - single practitioners are largely shunned. This partner would come in for an hour, two or three days a week and did nothing. Nada. He was also a drunk. I remember it well because he told us of the attacks on the Twin Towers and frankly, nobody gave it credence. I also worked for one who was as mad as a Lloydloom garden chair. Only God knows the tangled web of legal catastrophes I left behind because the partners left me to do the tedious stuff like conveyancing. On one occasion I was mocked up as the boss in order to deal with a difficult client. I never actually pretended to be the boss, but a good suit and a nice voice works wonders. How they ever understood the legal jargon is beyond me. Not one of them was really a first rate brain.
Yes humor it's a magical thing medically speaking and all other. Small towns, disadvantaged communities are rife with it. Humor is the armor and hold against despair. The Scots and Irish are prime examples of the weight of humor in communication & community. Now Lawyers and laws, yes they love words and are keen observers from my experience. I wrote about the Amber Vs DEP parade a while ago. Guilt Vs Innocence is not the winning note. The 'prize' is awarded to the team who swayed ' believable' proof. This fact gleamed from a Criminal Lawyer of my accaintance. All spelling errors and grammar sticks aside, as happens when texting on phone to lend comments.
More honest comment- I’m struggling with notes and how to not get caught up in all the noise? Do you have any tips?
It's a tricky one! And honestly, I don't have any real answers for social media as a whole. (I'd suggest reading Jenny Odell's "How To Do Nothing" for a bunch of really smart thoughts about using any social media platform - but that's as much as I've got, really.)
But I'm tackling Notes the same way I tackled Twitter in early 2021, when I realised it could be useful for gathering an audience for my newsletter. That presented a problem, because I HATED Twitter. I had around 6,500 followers on there, followed about 2,000 people, and everyone seemed to be cynical and angry and yelling and miserable and - above all - shouting about stuff I didn't care about.
So I decided to stop reacting. Yes, maybe leaving comments here and there, but - mainly, I wanted to carve out a place around my account that talked about the stuff that I felt enthusiastic about.
If you're just reacting on social media, and what you're reacting to makes you depressed and angry, then engaging *more* with that stuff (eg more efficiently) is just going to make you feel worse. And I already felt really, really bad. So I thought, "Nope, if it means I'm making myself irrelevant and out of touch, so be it - I'm just going to focus on what lights me up, and try to tune out most of the rest, especially the pointless angry nonsense coming from demonstrably terrible people who just wanted to annoy everyone enough to get attention."
So I started doing my sciencey Twitter threads - and that's when I found the people I wanted to hang out with.
So - who do YOU want to hang out with on Notes? And what if hanging out with them is partly dependent on what YOU post, not what they are posting? What if part of your purpose on Notes was to act as a lighthouse for the people you want to surround yourself with, by showing up again and again with the kinds of things those people would love to learn more about? Who are those people, where are they right now, and what would guide them towards you?
These are questions I keep asking myself and trying to answer, and I think *that* process is why my social media presence is helping my newsletter grow right now, and it's also feeling like a lot of fun to wrestle with.
Mike, I took pics of this comment to save in my phone. Thank you for such a thoughtful response. For a science guy, you really know how to throw in a workable metaphor. The lighthouse- love that in so many ways. My post on Sunday includes two things that are lighting me up right now- giving me hope about the kind of work that can make us kinder- how we might build bridges instead of shouting across the divide etc. I’m still having fun with audio. I had a few hiccups with this last one- my dog kept sabotaging but that kind of only added to the joy. Grateful!
Our science students study dog poop, and each year we are asked to share samples. Feel like they could be future winners. Going to share this post with the teacher in charge of all that. Not loving notes- feels like way too much noise. Not feeling like the benefits will outweigh the downside, but I appreciate your optimism as always.
Speaking as a former archaeology student, I can confirm that poop is AMAZINGLY INTERESTING: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-a-coprolite.html So much to learn, both from the non-human and the human kinds. A rich bounty of knowledge. But also hilarious, as the 2020 Ig Nobels proved: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/ig-nobel-prize-a-knife-made-of-poo-and-an-alligator-on-helium-among-2020-winners/
Excellent piece. Restocked on Notes because I ❤️ it, genteelly.
Thank you so much, Toby. *bows effusively with a little flourish at the end*
As a writer and editor, Including editor of some lawyerly columns, I can attest to the truth that, well, sometimes their phrasings are supremely confounding. One word that I always excise: "promulgate." Yikes!