More Than A List of Links

Creating resources off social media

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Phonebook 4 from Threewalls, released 2015

There’s a sewist I’ve followed for years who writes these gorgeous behind-the-scenes essays about the clothing she makes. It’s one of those blogs that’s stayed bookmarked through multiple browsers even before I started sewing, a website I’d return to whenever I needed a reference or craved inspiration from someone so much better at this than me.

One day I noticed it’d been months since her last entry. After five seconds of search engine “detective” “work” it turned out that she hadn’t been in a terrible sewing accident; she was just now posting all of the content to instagram. Same longform writing, now just smashed into a caption. It’s more annoying to read or reference, near impossible to navigate as an archive, and tougher to access as someone off the platform.

What happens to all the good information when it gets lost in the algorithm? All of our wisdom, all of that advice? My heart breaks a little when I see the same phenomena happening with community resources: the compilation posts of local orgs to get involved with, the event listings and calendars, the calls for volunteers or monetary support.

I wish I didn’t see it by chance. I wish it wasn’t so quickly yanked into a riptide of other breaking news and memes and a zoomed-in photo of a moth that looks like it is smiling. I wish I could hold it all in my hands instead. Or at the very least: not log in to see it.

There is an ephemerality to compiling information this way on the platforms – a there and gone-ness – when, repeated enough times, leaves us with the social information landscape we have now. Information quickly disappears. We miss out on a chance to build lists and followings. And it’s all designed for the platform’s turf, within the design constraints of whatever we’re posting on – not our own.

It sets us up with two paradoxical but intertwined realities, especially when it comes to the local resources we so badly need:

1. We can’t imagine leaving social media for fear of being out of the loop

2. We never create a compelling alternative for where we house important information

So how do we make the important information stay? Yes, part of it is about the medium. Not on social media is maybe half of the answer. There’s physical media, like zines, pamphlets, community boards, phonebooks, directories, binders of resources (my aunt, a legend, had a binder of local restaurant menus, all of them sheathed in plastic and organized by cuisine – what is the version of this for local venues and meeting places?) – but there’s also spreadsheets, docs, digital calendars, websites, digitized versions of physical media for easy printing out and distribution.

More important than where it ends up, it might be about the very principles at work when we create resources outside of social media, or even a bunch of links crammed in at the end of a newsletter (that’s a self burn):

• Fidelity of design – The resource itself will likely be higher quality. This could look like attractive aesthetic design, or thoughtful information organizing like this LA Resource Aid Tracker started during the fires. There’s just something about designing within the constraint of a platform that limits how good-looking, accessible, and clear information can truly be.

• Deeper engagement with resources – We’ve all reflexively shared links or posts without deeply understanding what they really are. We get smarter when we have to explain why a resource is important or worth checking out, in our own words. Adding context and descriptions along with our resources – while maybe not even using links at all! – is the use it in a sentence of sharing.

• Timestamping the moment – Sure, that list of clubs or volunteer opportunities might go out of date. But then it becomes something else important: an archive! One of my favorite possessions is a “phonebook” of alternative arts spaces across the country by Threewalls. Many of these likely don’t exist anymore, but I love this resource to a) show what was possible b) inspire me with its very format.

Also from Phonebook 4 – I wonder how many of these still exist!

• Shareable and platform agnostic – Websites of resources and physical flyers don’t require a login. With this, there are different variables of shareability, surveillance, and distribution that we can’t guarantee on the platforms.

• The creative act itself – Choosing our own medium and making it our own will flood us with a sense of agency in a way that jamming it onto instagram just never will. Imagine the experience of creating a printed local event calendar: you choose the type or you handwrite it all yourself, you pick the color and paper and if you want to add any weird flair, you get to talk to people or collaborate with a friend and check out other resources and curate what you include and then you do it all again but maybe make different creative choices next time.

We have more to gain as organizers, stewards, and archivists if we push ourselves to create community resources with staying power. It is both about the creative act itself and the experiential byproduct of creating resources with care, aka that extra quality of aliveness something has when you can tell the creator invested deep intention into it.

What would change if we brought even one of these qualities into something we’d ordinarily exclusively share on a platform? What if more love was given to the resource – owned by us, curated by us, crafted by us – and the platform became secondary? I’m thinking of a beloved local zine that organizes all of its event listings, classifieds, and feature pieces into its print version first, then it adapts some of these for their website, then shares events on social media. None of it has to last forever to be worth doing. But we might create the alternative resource landscape we deserve in the meantime.

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