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Category Archives "Wordpress"

Time to leave the enclosures

January 21, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Being, Culture, Democracy, Featured, Power, Wordpress 6 Comments

It is time to leave the enclosures. It is not worth trying to make our social networks work under the terms of unfettered fascists and venture capitalists who prey on our attention for profit.

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The Setup, a decade later

January 12, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Being, Bowen, Featured, Wordpress 6 Comments

Sitting here in the Seattle airport in the midst of a very long travel delay. We are working in Anchorage this week and flights there have been delayed and cancelled all day due to a massive windstorm. Our flight was due to leave an hour ago. We have another six hours to wait. All good. Travelling in northern North America in the winter requires endless patience and the occasional bout of creative travel planning. There is nothing better than threading the needle to get the last seat. It’s a much better way to channel energy than getting angry at the weather.

So I was reflecting on some old blog posts and found this one from 2015 where I talked about my working tech set up. Back then it was kind of popular to share things like that on blogs. Ten years later it’s interesting to see what has changed.

Infrastructure

I have a full office now. Since our son moved out in 2020 I have occupied a downstairs bedroom which affords me a proper office chair, an adjustable desk and a space for two guitars, a digital keyboard and books. I need more shelves, as the piles accruing in the corners of the room are starting to give me anxiety.

Our internet comes through Rogers now. Since 2015 when I last documented this set up, Rogers has run fibre to our island, and bought out Shaw. Internet is reliable and high speed and we’ve had very very few problems.

When I’m home on Bowen Island, I often walk the 1.5 kms to village and work in our library which has just installed a booth for taking calls. It’s a good place to write and a fantastic community asset. I think public libraries are as important as schools, water systems, and ferries.

Hardware

My workhorse these days is a 2021 iMac. It’s the first desktops I’ve had in a while, but once the pandemic changed life forever, my MacBook Air could handle the load of a lot of video and the screen wasn’t big enough to host online. The desktop is starting to show its age, and I probably need to give it a good cleaning. My old MacBook Air failed me in 2022 and I replaced it with a new one then.

An Epson printer is mostly used for printing music these days. Almost everything I do is done digitally now.

I have a iPhone 13 which keeps me connected. I’v started weaning myself off it, so it currently sits in another room from where I am most of the time. Even still, it’s remarkable how much I use it. I have some social media presence and I read various newspapers and news sites most mornings. I am studying Italian on Duolingo and I’m a crossword fan. Tripit is how I keep my travel schedule straight.

I have a Kindle which holds documents and ebooks that I find on BookBub, as well as free ebooks from Project Gutenberg and elsewhere. I mostly read actual books, but the Kindle is still always in my backpack.

Basic apps

These days almost everything I do now is in the cloud, using apps and web tools. It’s pretty remarkable. Caitlin just bought a new laptop and it was so easy to open it up, download a few apps and get back to work. Back in the old days, doing migrations was a day of work. Instead of buying software outright these days, we have subscriptions.

Over the past few years I have migrated most stuff to the Apple Universe. If Apple has the app for it, I’m using it. Once Safari acquired the capability to to Voice Typing on Google Docs, that sealed the deal for me. Chrome is on board but very rarely used. For Google I do use Gmail still as my primary email address, but I read all my mail through Mac Mail and the Calendar is kept in iCal. The only reason to enter the Google verse is to set calendar dates and attach a Zoom meeting automatically. I wish Apple would bring that functionality to iCal.

I use Apple Maps for navigating because it has better integration with my calendar, but Google Maps tends to be a better option because I assume it has more data points, so the real time updates are useful. Also for driving in unfamiliar places, Google Maps tends to give clearer instructions with lane selection and the names of streets more constant than in Apple Maps.

Most of my writing is done on Google Docs. Especially since the pandemic, this just remains the easiest and most universal platform for collaboration. I still use Evernote for capturing and clipping web sites, articles and papers. It’s my digital library. However over the years it has become clunkier and clunkier and so I have moved my notes and reminders back to the Apple apps. It makes them easier to share with my partner too.

We use Zoom for video meetings and workshops, and Padlet and Miro as our white board collaborative spaces. Since Google Jamboards were discontinued, we’ve subscribed to Padlet and find their Sandbox app to be a very good substitute, and slightly more powerful. We are using Kajabi to manage our courses. I use NarraFirma for Participatory Narrative Inquiry projects and run a separate NarraFirma server for that work.

Apple Music is my preferred streaming platform. Not Spotify.

Web publishing and Social Media

If you are reading this, you will know that I still use WordPress as the engine for my blog. Folks seem to find posts here through Google searches, reposting to social media and subscription. I’ll do a separate post on my approach to blogging these days, but suffice to say I think that self publishing is probably more important than ever now. I keep an active set of blog feeds in NetNewsWire, which is my feed reader of choice these days.

I was a power Twitter user from near the beginning and build a decent following there. Musk’s take over ruined that as a useful app. The app has long ago been offloaded from my phone and my business and soccer accounts have both been made dormant. They will just sit there now.

Likewise I have gone off Facebook for almost everything but republishing blog post links and a few specific connections to communities I am a part of. I hate Facebook, and as Zuckerberg has firmly entrenched his presence in the gallery of fascist oligarch propagandists, it’s losing its usefulness daily. I despair how many continue people use that site as their entire experience of the web.

I use LinkedIn to share posts and find interesting stuff. It’s tough though. It’s like walking through the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul trying to make friends and have a good conversation while people constantly try to sell you stuff you don’t need.

So these days I have pledge not to invest in building a social network on any platform owned by a billionaire who can just change his mind on a whim. To that end you will find me on Mastodon, and specifically on the mstdn.ca instance which is large and inclusive and has a values statement I can support. On Mastodon I share links and engage in some conversation. I think of it as a true microblogging platform, so it compliments this one. Every month I publish a summary of links I find there on this blog.

My Mastodon feed is bridged to Bluesky so if you can follow me there if you like, if you prefer that app. I don’t engage in conversation there on that account.

You will find me active on Bluesky at my account devoted to my participation in the world of Canadian soccer.

Social Infrastructure

Since that post in 2015, things have changed and things have stayed the same. Still singing in local choirs, one based in our United Church and the other, Carmena Bowena, an a cappella Renaissance choir that performs locally. Things have changed since the pandemic, but village life is still the same. I feel less close to friends these days. I’m not drinking as much, so I don;t show up at the Pub, but I’m not averse to a spontaneous hour long cup of coffee, like I did yesterday.

My volunteer commitments have mostly wound down for now with the exception of TSS Rovers, the semi-professional soccer team that I co-own with 450 other shareholders. We are Canada’s first supporter owned soccer team and play in the Men’s and Women’s divisions in League 1 BC, basically the second tier of Canadian soccer. I’m a member of the leadership group for the Supporter’s Trust which represents the voice of the community owners on the Board. I absolutely love being a part of this.

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Walking away from facebook

January 15, 2019 By Chris Corrigan Being, Culture, Democracy, Featured, Wordpress 17 Comments

Back in December I announced my intention to take a sabbatical from Facebook and see what would happen. There were a number of factors in that decision, and I’ll share what I learned and what I’m doing now. 

I had a few reasons for wanting to take a break:

  1. Facebook was a huge time waster, and earlier last year I deleted the app from my phone (it and Messenger and Instagram track your life your life and serve you ads based on what you’ve been doing). As a result, I have spent a lot less time there, although I do spend a lot of time on twitter.
  2. Facebook in engaged in undermining democracy and articles I was reading in 2018 pointed to their intentional and unintentional aiding and abetting behaviour with respect to undermining elections and eroding democratic engagement.  Here is a good Atlantic article on that.
  3. Facebook creates a deep gravity well for conversation. It tailors your news feed using algorithms to only serve you a very small slice of your friends’ activity. Much of what you see confirms what you know and it is designed to activate your brain in a way that causes you to share information and pass it on, deepening confirmation bias, and spreading rumours and lies.
  4. People communicate on Facebook in shallow and brief ways, meaning large and important conversations for local communities become pile ons, where people that have never made the effort to introduce themselves to others in real life nevertheless feel free to be mean spirited and even borderline libellous while hiding behind their virtual identities.  This has major implications in a small community like mine, where big local issues result in people starting rumours, passing judgements and ostracizing and slandering others in a way they would never do if they had to write to the newspaper, or see these people at the General Store. Discussions of complex ideas have devolved into the equivalent of drive-by shootings, often deeply personal.

These were the reasons I took a break and these are the reasons I am not coming back in a meaningful way.

When I started blogging in 2001, the promise of the Web 2.0 was that it would usher in the era of the creator. Any one could now create work on line. Recording studios, radio stations, television and film productions, newspaper, and magazines and book publishing all used to be inaccessible for the common person or the beginner artist. Now anyone could use whatever form of medium they wanted to say what is important to them. Before social media, Web 2.0 was about content creation media. It took time and effort to do it, but you could build a life, connect with others, find community in far flung corners of the globe, and make a contribution. 

When social media came about into widespread use, around 2007 in my case with Facebook, the blogging world almost completely disappeared. People whose blogs I followed moved into facebook where I followed them for a while until their well crafted posts were lost in the endless stream of mindless diarizing, half-baked opinions and, later, the endless copypasta of shared memes and viral content. I had a hard time finding my people, but I was enjoying wishing friends a happy birthday and connecting with people from school, 30 years ago.

Over the past ten or so years what has happened is that my time has disappeared into the suck hole of scrolling through useless content instead of producing some of my own. Yesterday, talking with my friend Julien Thomas, I remembered that somewhere I said that democracy depends on us being active participants and not consumers.

Social media has made us consumers of other people’s content. In the 2001-2007 era of blogging, someone would write a post and if it was meaningful to you, you would quote it with an annotation about why it mattered and what your take was on it. Conversation was more considered and content was savoured and appreciated and hardly ever simply passed on.  We were all content creators, hyperlinked to other content creators. When commenting began, discussion started to remain in a limited number of places but it was all open in the public and available to anyone. Comment spam really killed open discussion on blogs and maintaining spam-free comments sections became time-consuming. (Luckily there are better tools now, which is why you need to wait for me to approve comments on my blog).

With the dawn of Facebook however, content creation became highly concentrated in only a relatively and proportionally small number of places. Most people on Facebook simply pass it on other people’s stuff, often without any credit or link back to the original creator, and discussion happens behind closed doors and isn’t archived or very easy to access.

These days we are consumers of other people’s content, and we generally pass on what we like and agree with, amplifying it’s impact without adding to it. A few people have complained that they miss me on facebook, that they miss my voice and the things I say. But what I notice is that they like those things mostly because they can pass them on, or because what I have to say validates their views. It makes me I wonder where THEIR voice is, why they haven’t been thinking about things and sharing original opinions. And I wonder half-heartedly why I never get stuff from in my news feed that challenges my biases and my ideas anymore. 

I have recently created a sock puppet twitter account to engage with conservatives in Canada, including those who are nationalist, populist and extreme right-wing. I am curious and concerned about the rise of populism and nationalism in Canada and the global connections between far right leaders who are promoting anti-immigrant, anti-globalist politics and messages.  Through my “fake” twitter account, I am meeting conservatives that are also opposed to these far right echo chambers, and I am having my own ideas challenged. I am getting into debates and conversations with people I vehemently disagree with. I am posing on twitter as a real person, but not as “Chris Corrigan.”

I’m not going to reveal the identity of that twitter account. It says something to me about the nature of the social media landscape that I feel deeply uncomfortable showing up as my own self in those conversations.  Debating with Nazis is not a safe thing to do, especially when one is debating with people hiding behind anonymous identities. And so I show up as a real person but with a fake name. Interesting.

Social media has become a place where relationships have become commercialized transactions and where democratic engagement has devolved into a fact free festival of insulting the other and patting your friends and allies on the back while being served highly specific advertising messages from corporations and political influencers. All the while, someone other than you is getting rich every time you connect to a friend. While it is nice to “stay in touch” I have to say that most of what passes across my screens on facebook is of very little value to me.

I would encourage people to go back to, or start blogging, and I’d encourage you to do it in the spirit of 2001 blogging, not in the spirit of “blog as PR tool” that we see today: share things, speculate, use it as a platform for what I call “Open Source Learning.”  Use it as a gift exchange, not as a digital business card. Embed links to other people and add to the gifts of knowledge you receive before passing them on. You can start with WordPress as a powerful, free and easy-to-get-started-with tool.

For me I’ll be using facebook in these ways going forward:

  • I’ll be continuing to promote workshops and events there, and for limited times, participating in facebook groups where that is chosen by the group as a way of keeping in touch.
  • I will occasionally scan my feed and if I see that you have a birthday, or have experienced a death in the family, and you are a person with whom I have a personal relationship, you may well get an email or a phone call from me.
  • I will share blog posts on facebook, but encourage discussion to happen here on the blog, where the world can see it and anyone can participate.

I’ll be going off Instagram and What’s App entirely (both owned by Facebook) and continuing to use twitter (@chriscorrigan) as a place for spontaneous conversation and meeting new voices.  You can find my photos on Flickr, which has recently become revitalized and awesome again. If you have a blog, let me know and I’ll add you to my RSS feed (I use Inoreader for that)

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10 years and still going

September 6, 2012 By Chris Corrigan Practice, Wordpress 13 Comments

Ten years ago on September 6, 2002 I launched this blog with an innocuous little link to an on lie art project ground through Euan Semple.  I called the blog Parking Lot, which is the term facilitators use for a flip chart where we record things that are off topic to the subject at hand, but important enough to come back to.  Since then I have used this space as my open source learning pad, to explore and grow in the field of facilitation, organizational and community development and random other bits and pieces of living.  I’ve had long extended sidelines into poetry and art, music and taekwondo, bits and pieces and threads and buttons that have led somewhere or nowhere, notes that have been quoted, posts that went viral.  I’ve met amazing friends, had fleeting fame and even got into a few fights over the years in this little space.

I have often said that this space is the book I will never write – I learn so fast and change my mind so much that a book is almost too static a format for me.  If you want to see the book that I will never write, head over to “A Collection of Life’s Lessons” which is a occasionally updated meta blog of this site’s greatest hits.  Print all those posts out, make a nice cover and there you have a book.  For free.

So this blog has been a saving grace – a place where I can jot down notes, record great links and sources and leave a legacy for my own reference.  Over the years, twitter and Facebook have become more and more prevalent in my writing life, and this blog has gone through periods of being neglected and avoided.  There are a million links in my twitter feed that are more instantly useful, and I’m trying to get into a rhythm of writing about them a little longer here.

So as the summer falls away and the fall simmers around the corner, join me in raising a glass of whisky and toasting ten years of Parking Lot.  Thanks for being along for some of the journey.

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Be patient with the comments

August 12, 2008 By Chris Corrigan Wordpress One Comment

I’ve installed and strengthened my spam filters for comments and trackbacks, so as you comment it may take a while to appear. Please be patient…thanks!

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