an extended meditation on presence (we also have chickens)
Long time no blog. I've been getting through the first marking period, doing Librarian Stuff including prep to receive a donation of Literally One Thousand Books, No Really, Ten Hundred Books Someone is Donating To Us, Can You Believe It, I Still Don't. I guess I'm not getting fired this year, lol.
As I come to the end of the Year of Yeeting Big Tech, I'm also thinking a lot about the limits of individual action. Sure, I can (and have) stopped using nearly all Oligarch Tech products, except places like work where I can't avoid them. I no longer have broadband Internet at home and I love it. My relationship with my phone is a lot healthier than it used to be (not the least because the whole school now has a no-phone policy, and I'm not going to undermine my students' basic respect for me by having mine out when they can get in trouble for the same thing).
But absolutely everything I read about the addiction or inattention or privacy issues with our tech ends with the same conclusion: "Individual action can't actually do much; what we need is a collective push for meaningful legislative change."
I agree that collective pushes for meaningful change actually work. I've seen them work in my lifetime. Humpback whales, bald eagles, and Canada geese were endangered when I was a kid; now the last are so plentiful where I live they're considered a local nuisance. (I personally love the hissing chickens, but I'm weird like that.) CFCs were tearing a hole in the ozone layer when I was born; now that hole is healing itself. My own grandmother couldn't legally have a bank account or credit card in her own name until my mom was out of high school; she went on to have a successful solo life and career. And so on.
Yet I find myself wondering if social media - precisely the thing we need to collectively push to meaningfully change - isn't purpose-built to prevent us from banding together collectively for meaningful change. I don't just mean its attention-fragmenting, privacy-obliterating features; I also mean its tendency to convince us that slacktivism is all we need. You don't need to go out and organize! Just share this video and like that post, see, you did the thing, you are a Good Person who is Fighting the Good Fight.
To put it another way:
The term "neurodivergent" is now commonplace. I run into all sorts of people in this job who use it as if it's always been the term to use. I even meet people who correctly distinguish between "neurodivergent" and "neurodiversity," which are related but not synonymous.
Yet. Not only do I remember when this was not a thing, I was one of the core few researchers and teachers, back in 2015, pushing for the use of both terms. I wrote one of the first articles to break down the difference between "neurodiversity" and "neurodivergence", between "neurodiverse" and "neurodivergent," as terms.
There were a handful of us who were Extremely Online in those days, so I saw this specific linguistic conversation unfold both online and offline. I was part of both conversations.
In hindsight: Yeah, we changed how the language works, and we did it in under ten years, which blows my mind. It's wild to see something I cutting-edge advocated for in 2013 and only began being asked about in 2015 become utterly commonplace by 2025.
But also: We didn't change how language works by calling people ableist on the Internet. Credit where it's due to Kassiane Asasumasu, who coined "neurodivergent" in those early conversations, but K's approach back then was to yell on social media first, and that's not what did the heavy lifting. We (K included) did the heavy lifting by writing, and publishing, and speaking at conferences, and having serious one to one conversations among ourselves and others in related fields.
Social media facilitated some of these connections. I met several other folks in the field on social media, and I had a few really good conversations on messaging apps. But social media wasn't where we *did* the work. Slacktivism wasn't the answer.
I currently have a dozen tabs open in my browser on slacktivism research. This post might be an obsolete take on my views by lunchtime. But as I saw that community split into "those who yell on social media" and "those who have work to do," I wonder how often that happens in other communities - and what kind of collective action gets kneecapped as a result. (I am, as Jennifer Partin put it, at Stage 6 of neurodivergence activism: "avoiding my own community for the sake of my cardiovascular health.")
Today: reading these tabs and then continuing the absolutely mind-numbing work of locating every book in this collection that is a candidate for weeding. I have some empty shelves, but I'm also going to need to make some room for this Literal Pallet of One Hundred Tens of Books incoming. I am also going to need to teach some processing volunteers how to prep these for cataloging. (A good problem to have.)
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