My grandma isn’t on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, or the fediverse. But she isn’t completely offline.
She has a smart phone, but she uses it to check the weather, text friends and family, and make phone calls. She is purposeful with her online usage.
The closest thing she has to social interaction online is that she reads her close friend’s blog. With the rest of her free time, she gardens, talks to her grandkids, keeps physically active, cooks, and donates her time helping out at the local library. Most of the significant parts of her life are outside of the internet. And the parts that are online are not algorithmically driven.
If she has a comment on her friend’s blog, she texts, calls, or meets up with this friend. There isn’t an interaction in front of a wider audience. It’s personal, one-on-one. And when she’s done reading the post of the day, she closes the window.
I’ve seen some posts lately about the “small” web and it reminded me of her friend’s blog, as well as my own. Her friend logs into the website editor, writes down her thoughts for the day, posts it, and moves on.
The intentionality of both her friend’s posting and my grandma’s reading is eye opening.
Maybe I should be more like my grandma, both online and offline.