Tag Archives ⇒ Instagram

Generational strategies for Quaker outreach

August 5, 2018
· Martin Kelley

From Emi­ly Provance:

An under-45 com­mu­ni­ca­tions strat­e­gy, in con­trast, would most­ly involve social media (Face­book, Insta­gram, Twit­ter, pos­si­bly Tum­blr or Pin­ter­est). Arti­cles would be short and would con­tain most­ly con­tent direct­ly rel­e­vant to the read­er — or, if the con­tent were not direct­ly rel­e­vant, it would be single-story nar­ra­tives with an empha­sis on per­son­al impact. Announce­ments would come out through mes­sen­ger apps or text mes­sages, with a strong ele­ment of user con­trol about which announce­ments to receive and which not. Pho­tos and videos would be used frequently.

I’m always a bit wary of gen­er­a­tional deter­min­ism. I think gen­er­a­tional ideas are more like under­ly­ing trends that get more or less trac­tion over time. And Quak­er dig­i­tal out­reach in par­tic­u­lar has been a thing for a quar­ter cen­tu­ry now. But the under­ly­ing mes­sage — that some peo­ple need to be reached dig­i­tal­ly while oth­ers are still best served by print — is a sound one and I’m glad Emi­ly’s bring­ing it up.

But it’s still kind of sad that we still need to make this kind of argu­ment. I remem­ber hav­ing these dis­cus­sions around an FGC out­reach com­mit­tee table fif­teen years ago: sure­ly we’re all on board about the need for dig­i­tal out­reach in 2018?

The 45-Yard Line

YouTube star Jessica Kellgren-Fozard on her Quakerism

July 20, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Jes­si­ca Kellgren-Fozard is a dis­abled TV pre­sen­ter with 266,000+ fol­low­ers on YouTube. She’s also a life­long Friend from the UK. She’s just released a video in which she talks about her under­stand­ing of Quak­erism. It’s pret­ty good. She occa­sion­al­ly implies that some specif­i­cal­ly British pro­ce­dur­al process is intrin­sic to all Quak­ers but oth­er than that it all rings true, cer­tain­ly to her expe­ri­ence as a UK Friend.

I must admit that the world of YouTube stars is for­eign to me. This is essen­tial­ly a web­cam vlog post but the light­ing and hair and cos­tum­ing is metic­u­lous. Her notes include affil­i­ate links for the dress she’s wear­ing ($89 and yes, they ship inter­na­tion­al­ly), a 8 1/2 minute video tuto­r­i­al about curl­ing you hair in her vin­tage style (it has over 33,000 views). If you fol­low her on Insta­gram and Twit­ter you’ll soon have enough details on  lip­stick and shoe choic­es to be able to ful­ly cos­play her.

But don’t laugh too much, because in between the self pre­sen­ta­tion tips, Kellgren-Fozard tack­les real­ly hard sub­jects – grow­ing up gay in school, liv­ing with dis­abil­i­ties – in ways that are approach­able and inti­mate, fun­ny and instruc­tive. And with a quar­ter mil­lion YouTube fol­low­ers, she’s reach­ing peo­ple with a mes­sage of kind­ness and inclu­sion and under­stand­ing that feels pret­ty Quak­er­ly to me. Mar­garet Fell liked her­self a red dress some­times and it’s easy to argue George Fox would be a YouTu­ber today.

Bonus:  Jes­si­ca Kellgren-Fozard will host a live Q&A chat on her Quak­erism this com­ing Mon­day. If I’m cal­cu­lat­ing my time­zones cor­rect­ly, it’ll be noon here on the U.S. East Coast. I plan to tune in.

October flashbacks: Turns of phrases, Quaker political influence, and of course Halloween

October 12, 2017
· Martin Kelley

Appar­ent­ly I once had an idea of peri­od­i­cal­ly shar­ing posts from ear­li­er eras of my blogs: flash­backs to archival posts writ­ten one, five, and ten years ear­li­er. Maybe I could man­age this once a month.

1 Year Ago: October 2016

Bring peo­ple to Christ / Leave them there: One thing I love to do is track back on cul­tur­al Quak­er turns of phrase. Here I looked at a phrase some­times attrib­uted to George Fox and find a large­ly for­got­ten British Friend who laid much of the ground­work for Quak­er mod­ernism and the unit­ing of Amer­i­can Quakers.

5 Years: October 2012

The secret decoder ring for Red and Blue states: Dis­cus­sion of the Quak­er cul­tur­al influ­ence of Amer­i­can vot­ing pat­terns based on David Hack­ett Fischer’s fas­ci­nat­ing (if over-argued) book Albion’s Seed.

10 Years: October 2007

An Autum­nal Hal­loween: A fam­i­ly post, pic­tures of kids post­ed to the web long before Insta­gram was founded.

February 6, 2013
· Martin Kelley

The End of the Web, Search, and Com­put­er as We Know It:

parisle­mon:

I think about what constantly-flowing infor­ma­tion means for blog­ging. In some ways this is Twit­ter, Insta­gram, Tum­blr, etc. But what if some­one start­ed a stand-alone blog that wasn’t a series of posts, but rather a con­tin­u­ous stream of blurbs, almost like chat. For exam­ple: “I just heard…” or “Microsoft launch­ing this is stu­pid, here’s why…” — things like that. More like an always-on live blog, I guess.

It’s sort of strange to me that blogs are still based around the idea of fully-formed arti­cles of old. This works well for some con­tent, but I don’t see why it has to be that way for all con­tent. The real-time com­mu­ni­ca­tion aspect of the web should be uti­lized more, espe­cial­ly in a mobile world.

Peo­ple aren’t going to want to sit on one page all day, espe­cial­ly if there’s noth­ing new com­ing in for a bit. But push noti­fi­ca­tions could alle­vi­ate this as could Twit­ter as a noti­fi­ca­tion lay­er. And with mul­ti­ple peo­ple on “shift” doing updates, there could always be fresh con­tent, com­ing in real time.

Just think­ing out loud here.

Good out loud think­ing from MG about where blogging’s going. I’ve real­ized for while now that I’m much more like­ly to use Twit­ter and Tum­blr to share small snip­pets that aren’t worth a fully-formed post. What I’ve also real­ized is that I’m more like­ly to add com­men­tary to that link share (as I’m doing now) so that it effec­tive­ly becomes a blog post. 

Because of this I’m seri­ous­ly con­sid­er­ing archiv­ing my almost ten year old blog (care­ful­ly pre­serv­ing com­ment threads if at a pos­si­ble) and installing my Tum­blr on the Quak​er​Ran​ter​.org domain.