Photo by Jordan Murray, @lovelyliterary

Jordan Murray’s perfectly manicured hand displays an annotated title page of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. “From the library of Jordan Murray” is stamped in the centre; just below she’s written, “the cost of pride, love & marriage, social status.” And all around are illustrations of tiny flowers, hearts and envelopes along with a drawing of the famous 18th century English novelist. A multitude of coloured tabs peek out from the novel’s pages.

Murray’s @lovelyliterary Instagram page is an ode to the modern aesthetics of online book lovers. Murray, a 23-year-old University of Windsor student, is an avid book annotator and part of the boom of young adults passionate about reading.

According to a survey by BookNet Canada, a non-profit that collects and analyzes data about the Canadian book industry, half of those surveyed in the 18 to 29 age group preferred books in print. The medium is optimal for recording thoughts, reactions, and feelings in annotated form, and the phenomenon has spread. Practitioners share the art and joy of book annotation on book blogs, Pinterest, Instagram and BookTok, a TikTok subcommunity. Novices seek advice and tips on Reddit and Goodreads. Online retailers like Etsy and Amazon advertize purpose-made book annotation supplies.

OK, Boomer: this isn’t your version of annotating with pencil in hand, making surreptitious notes in margins. Millennials and Gen Zers go all out. They underline, circle and highlight pages. They generously apply different coloured tabs and stickers. “I’m swooning” moments, memorable quotes, relatable themes and spicy scenes are marked. Some annotators have colour coding systems—pink tabs to represent cute scenes, green for standout paragraphs. They also create legends or tables of content for easy reference. The more aesthetically inclined will match the colours of their tabs to their book covers. When it comes to supplies, tools of the trade include pens, scissors, tweezers, rulers, stickers, coloured tabs and highlighters.

“On a more surface level, it’s treated like an art form,” says Murray. “Sometimes it’s idealized for the aesthetics.”

But while these book enthusiasts use their online platforms to spread the word about their art and share with others, creating a hybrid medium of sorts, they also say the hobby offers a much-needed reprieve from the digitization of their lives. “It’s a form of self care, to really connect with my books and disconnect from the world,” says 36-year-old Alexandra Kelebay, a Montrealer and book columnist for CBC/Radio Canada who posts on Instagram @thebookishglow. “It is also a very creative process for some, which is another fascinating way to approach it; people quite literally transform their books into art objects this way, which is a wonderful antidote to our highly digital, online existence.”

This is something Danielle Fuller has observed in her research. The University of Alberta professor of English and film studies is interested in how Gen Z are drawn to analogue media even while they might choose to display their material practices, such as annotation, via digital technology. “Since [Gen Z] grew up with technology, they don’t want to be on screens all the time. Some of their motivations for choosing a print book is to get off screens and that networked environment.”

Equally important is the hands-on approach book annotation affords them. “It makes the experience come alive—it’s physical, tactile, and a kind of tangible way of experiencing a book,” says Kelebay. “When people especially connect with characters or themes in a book, it can be transformative, so annotating concretizes an experience that would otherwise remain abstract.”

Annotation also provides an opportunity to internalize away from a wired world focused on constant social interaction and stimulation.

“For me, annotating has always been something very personal, so to share this with someone would feel very open and vulnerable, almost like peeking into my journal,” says Kelebay. “It’s where I highlight meaningful lines, passages, and quotes, as well as scribble thoughts in the margins as I read. For me it’s a solitary, meditative experience.”

There’s another motivating factor. A few generations ago, books, reading, and annotation were the domain of geeks and scholars. Academics meticulously pored over classic literature and recorded their thoughts. This came with the implicit understanding that only centuries-old tomes by long-dead authors were worthy of annotation—a concept the new generation of book lovers rejects.

Murray started annotating for her Grade 9 English class unit on Shakespeare. But she says she now annotates whatever she’s enjoying – from a Sally Rooney novel to a horror-thriller. “Annotating has made the practice of reading more accessible and enjoyable. It isn’t just for Tolstoy or Austen anymore; it could also be for romance books with cute moments or thrillers with shocking reveals.”

These days, the practice is for everyone. “It leans into the idea that geekiness is now kind of cool,” says Fuller. And that geekiness is viral and massively influential among young adults. A 2024 Statista survey revealed 37 percent of TikTok users in Canada are Gen Z, with BookTok amassing 45.7 million posts. Then there’s BookTube, an online literary community where 90 percent of users are aged 18-24. At the same time, viral book clubs are helmed by the young, rich and famous: there’s Belletrist from Emma Roberts, and model Kaia Gerber’s Library Science. With this kind of star power, it’s no wonder book lovers are happy to share their love for the written word. And annotation is just one way to both publicly and privately display that feeling.

It’s a feeling shared by Ryan Jones, though she takes a digital approach. “I’m 26-years-old, but I’m definitely an old soul at heart,” says the writer and marketing specialist in Waterloo, Ontario. “I like to keep the integrity of the physical book as it is.”

Jones annotates her e-book versions of novels and makes notes on her phone about the writing, characters, and plot. “I do like to highlight things that make me feel so deeply.” And deep feelings about books show no signs of waning, thanks to this passionate generation of young readers.

Before March of 2020, I found myself on a video conference once or twice a week. Back then, it still had something special to it, helping me connect to colleagues all over the world. Then, the world turned upside down because of COVID-19, and I found myself spending several hours per day on video calls to manage remote teams from home—let’s say the past excitement of video conferencing swiftly disappeared.

Video calls have been around for decades, with webcams and software such as Skype becoming popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The impact of Skype was so important that it inserted itself into our vocabulary: videoconferencing became “Skyping.” The pandemic redefined the use of video calls, as people around the world were forced to shelter in place and practice social distancing. The app Zoom, in particular, has since become a staple of both remote work and gathering with family and friends, even taking Skype’s place in our vocabulary and spawning new concepts, such as “Zoom fatigue.” Put simply, Zoom fatigue is when one feels tired from having been focused on video calls for too long. Video calls can be overstimulating: the feeling of being watched constantly, the strain from processing multiple social cues in the gallery of faces, and delays in both audio and video, contribute to an overall feeling of exertion.

After about a year and a half of remote work and social distancing, videoconferencing took a back seat as several new audio-only apps were released, gaining incredible popularity. The app generating the most hype in spring 2021 was Clubhouse, a networking app based on voice. Clubhouse users can create chat rooms, or drop into others’ rooms to listen or participate in discussions, often with complete strangers.

Other apps like Teamflow and Kumospace, meanwhile, recreate an office’s environment and let their employees mingle more easily. They offer an alternative to Zoom fatigue and recreate serendipitous moments like chance encounters and coffee machine conversations. The audio trend has already been reported on by national outlets such as Wired, identifying audio as the future of social media and communications.

Is the future really audio? While the trendiness of audio-centric apps is exciting, they raise important concerns regarding accessibility for the blind and vision-impaired as well as Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities. These demographics are expected to grow over the next decades due to an aging population as well as other factors; vision loss in particular is predicted to double in the next 25 years, according to VISION 2020: The Right to Sight, an initiative launched by the World Health Organization and the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness. Moreover, there is no credible census available to determine exactly how many Canadians are living with a disability. According to the Canadian Association of the Deaf- Association des Sourds du Canada (CAD-ASC), the census usually provided by Statistics Canada isn’t available in ASL or LSQ (Langue des Signes Québécoise), and uses convoluted language that leads to misreported numbers. Wissam Constantin, the vice-president of Governance and Membership of the CAD-ASC, explained the importance of sign language to the Deaf population: “Often people will only refer to spoken languages when it comes to being fluent or multilingual, for example English. But sign language [ASL] is not just a bunch of gestures or movements; it is a true language with a structure, grammar and syntax.” Using closed-captioning on calls or communicating by email instead of having an interpreter is not being absolutely accessible, Constantin says, as it doesn’t give the individual the ability to choose their preferred method of communication. Without any closed-captioning or video capabilities, audio-only apps can be hard, if not impossible, to access for Deaf populations; as for blind and vision-impaired populations, difficulties lie within the design of the apps and their compatibility with screen readers. Screen readers are speech software that read the text displayed on screen and help the user navigate commands, buttons and even images, and alternative text and accessibility must be built into the apps to allow for compatibility.

Unfortunately, accessibility is too often an afterthought when developing and designing new apps or features, and many popular apps do not meet the web accessibility guidelines, which are a set of recommendations to ensure content is accessible to a wider range of populations. Discord, which started out as an audio chat service for online gamers but recently rebranded as a place for everyone to hang out, has been criticized for how they approach accessibility. While they have been adding features to help vision-impaired users better navigate the app in recent months, it’s been slow progress, and it clashes with their fresh branding. Twitter came under fire last year when they launched their own audio feature, Spaces, which lets users record their tweets instead of being restricted to 280 characters, because it lacked accessibility. It was revealed that the company doesn’t have a team dedicated to accessibility, and that ensuring features are accessible falls to volunteer employees.

Clubhouse is exclusive not only in design: as an invite-only app, it gives out invitations to members so they can invite their friends. In short, chances of getting on there are slim, and as an audio-only app with no closed-captioning feature, it de facto excludes hard-of-hearing and Deaf people. However, it’s not the only social media app whose concept is exclusive in nature. Instagram, for example, can be of little interest for blind and vision-impaired individuals. Marcia Yale, the national president of the Alliance for Equality of Blind Canadians, confesses to loving Clubhouse because “it levels the playing field. No one can see me … it’s not a two-tier system. I understand that the Deaf community would probably not like Clubhouse, but there’s Instagram, which is mostly pictures, which I’m not crazy about.” The world of social media is certainly not lacking options, between Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, to name just a few. Asked if she thought there were enough options to cater to everyone, Yale says: “I think there’s room in the world for apps that work for everyone, apps that work for some people. I think there’s room enough.”

Constantin expressed a similar sentiment, saying that the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community has, out of sheer necessity, been using other apps to communicate, such as Marco Polo, a video chat app. Newcomers such as Clubhouse are not taking those spaces away, though they remain inaccessible to Deaf people.

It’s another story when it comes to work or study, and that’s where accessibility is still a big challenge. When joining a new company, an individual doesn’t have the luxury to choose which communication software their employer is using, which means they can easily be left behind. It would seem that accessibility is not only a question of accessible software, but accessibility-minded leadership as well.

Constantin gives an example of such a situation members of CAD-ASC often encounter: “Deaf individuals who work in [a]predominantly hearing workplace will be told that there are captions, or they’ll have a meeting and say to that Deaf individual: ‘We’ll just send you the notes,’ rather than having them included in the meeting. And if you have any concerns, rather than those being brought up in the meeting, as part of the meeting, just send an email with your concerns instead of providing that actual access to the meeting.

Now, sometimes those meetings are on the phone, they’re not a video chat, right, and that is also another barrier.” Teamflow and Kumospace create virtual environments and use proximity chat to create little bubbles of conversation, in a similar way an in-person event would, allowing participants to leave conversations and join new ones easily. Teamflow didn’t respond to requests for comment. Kumospace co-founder Brett Martin was happy to discuss their product. Martin readily admitted that Kumospace had plenty of room for improvement, but that accessibility and inclusivity were paramount to the start-up: closed-captioning and image alt text were built into the app’s design, making it easy to use and navigate for Deaf and hard-of-hearing as well as screen reader users.

To say that the future of social media and communication is audio is digital ableism, which means it is designed with abled individuals in mind and leaves disabled people to find solutions to be able to use the apps. While a part of the population can partake in the hype and excitement brought by the likes of Clubhouse, others are relying on very different apps to be able to connect with the world.

Whether a perfect, accessible social media app exists or not is up for debate. Both Yale and Constantin agree that Zoom is the best option in terms of overall accessibility for remote communication. At the end of the day, the specific app being used is not the most important consideration, but rather accommodating people as individuals is. As Constantin says, “Don’t pick the accommodation for the person who’s being accommodated. Instead, ask them the way they would like to be accommodated.”

LLUSTRATION BY JULIA GALOTTA

After my father died, I looked for him everywhere. Time crept forward in my one-bedroom apartment and my boyfriend might’ve been the only reason I even noticed the passing of days. His comings and goings signalled whether it was time to grieve at my desk, on the couch, or the bed. My desk, hardly a writing space anymore, became a place to search for my dad. I typed his name into my browser daily.

On one of these days, I was looking through my cloud storage for something when I found an unfamiliar folder in the “shared files” section of my account. It was simply titled “Google Photos.” I clicked and found several more folders and dozens more inside them, all with names like “Christmas_2013_Pics_&_Vids” and “2002 Family Vacation.”

My dad had never mentioned it, but at some point he must have shared these files without my noticing. I could see that they’d also been shared with my brother’s account as well as a cousin’s. There were photos from graduation ceremonies and photos of long-forgotten trips: in one, I’m 12 years old, standing in a shallow pool at a water park in Newfoundland. In another, my brother is balancing on a seesaw as if it were a skateboard. There were even photos I had never seen. I pored over the images for hours, leaving no folder unclicked. My eyes grew tired from staring at the screen.

Up to that point, my dad’s social media, Facebook in particular, had acted like a time capsule. Photos and posts triggered memories, which allowed me to retrace my steps and regain some sanity. I had spoken to my dad in my head many times, begging for some kind of sign so I could know he was at peace. I didn’t have any prophetic dreams. No spirit floated to my window at twilight. But I could find plenty of ghosts online by conjuring them with Google searches. Although part of me must’ve realized this wasn’t healthy, the solace was worth it. As far as the internet was concerned, my father was still alive.
He breathed through photos, silly tweets, and the occasional email.

One of the last comments my dad made on Facebook was about me. “Our beautiful daughter. Twenty-three years old,” he wrote. It was a comment on a post from my mother, who had shared two photos of me with a caption wishing me a happy birthday. The first was a school portrait from elementary school. I wore a white t-shirt underneath a magenta spaghetti-strap dress, and my smile was missing a few teeth. The other photo was a recent snap of me at my aunt and uncle’s house, sitting in a wingback chair and obliging with a smile when someone, probably my mother, asked to take my picture. Here, my hair was pulled out of my face with a floral headband and my teeth were intact, straightened by two years of braces.

I said my dad wrote that comment, but it’s probably not entirely true. By that time, March 2016, my mom was managing most of my dad’s Facebook activity. He likely dictated the comment to her while she typed it and pressed enter.

Two months later, my dad died. He was 58.

My dad had ALS, a motor neuron disease that gradually debilitates muscle movement. His hands and arms were the first to go. They hung at his sides like dead weight, making his shoulders slump toward the ground. For a while, he would still try to answer the landline at home by knocking the receiver off the cradle and shouting into the phone from a standing position. “Dad, where is Mom?” I would ask, exasperated. Eventually, he accepted that he needed help—whether through voice-to-text technology or another person—to answer calls, send texts, and email.

My dad lived with ALS for two-and-a-half years before it killed him. During that time, social media was helpful. In the summer of 2014, the Ice Bucket Challenge took off and it became trendy to care about #ALS. On the internet, there was no way to escape it. Those videos made my dad laugh, and it felt as if people everywhere were supporting my family, knowingly or otherwise. According to the New York Times,

the Ice Bucket Challenge raised over $115 million (U.S.) for the ALS Association, which has helped scientists advance their research on the illness. Meanwhile, Canadians raised $17 million for the ALS Society of Canada. The society promoted a tagline and hashtag: “Every August until a cure.” However, the trend faded. It felt as if many people (even well-meaning, caring people) just forgot about ALS when the social media challenge, and phase, passed.

My mother is something of a Luddite and she’s generally against social media. The night my dad died, his brother made a Facebook post lamenting his passing—before my mom had even called all the extended family. This wasn’t a malicious act on my uncle’s part, but it meant that some relatives found out about my dad’s death through Facebook. My mom had to jump on the phone and make calls she wasn’t ready to make. She soon shared the news of my dad’s death on his own page along with a note asking his friends to keep an eye on the paper for an obituary and funeral details. It wasn’t long after that that my mom was asking my brother and me how to delete my dad’s Facebook page. I think it was just a few days after the funeral. I suggested she “memorialize” the page, but she said: “I just want it gone.” And so, it was. Just like my father. Gone.

I’m not sure how long after my dad’s funeral—maybe one week, maybe two—I discovered those archived photos in the cloud. They were comforting at first, but soon they weren’t enough. They emphasized the distance between then and now, alive and dead.

In an episode of Black Mirror called “Be Right Back,” a woman named Martha uses new technology to imitate the presence of her late husband. It evolves from text conversations to verbal phone conversations. Eventually, Martha orders a physical facsimile. Near the end of the episode, she yells at the vessel of artificial intelligence: “You are not enough of him!” Although that scenario is hyperbolic compared to mine, the character’s words express how I felt as I combed through those memories, reminding myself of everything my dad was. Reminding me of who I was when I still had a father.

I could get lost searching for every fingerprint my dad left on the internet, but it would never be satisfactory. I had to  pull back from that computer screen to find the arms of my partner again, and those of my friends, and my family. The arms of the living.

I still feel as if I’m looking for my dad and trying to maintain a relationship with him, but I believe I’m in a healthier place. Still, there are things I can’t part with. For some time after my dad’s death, his voice was still on the answering machine for my mom’s landline, saying, “You’ve reached Ron, Doreen, Chris and Becky.” I can relate. I’ve yet to change my cell phone’s contact name for that landline: “Mom and Dad.”

I just can’t delete “Dad.”

Artist Hana Shafi, known better as Frizz Kid. Photo by Augustine Ng.

Hana Shafi’s Instagram feed is a burst of bright colours and thick lines interspersed with the occasional selfie. The Toronto-based artist, who goes by Frizz Kid, posts images of her digital art almost every day. From the playful—an anthropomorphic pizza slice placed around the words “Thick as hell”—to the serious—a person, closed-eyed with purple hair, and the affirmation, “You didn’t deserve it. You weren’t ‘asking for it’”—Shafi’s work deals with themes like body positivity, healing from trauma, and self-growth.

With more than 29,000 followers on Instagram and now, a book of illustrated poetry, Shafi has enjoyed success in her work—at least some of which she can credit to social media. “I don’t know a lot of other spaces I could have been in,” she says.

Shafi recalls often feeling out of place in indie zine and arts markets because she would be the only Brown artist there, and, as a journalism school graduate, the only one without formal art training. She says social media is the only place where she could start being taken seriously as an artist.

Among the many other benefits—and, arguably, detriments—that social media has brought about, increased visibility for artists from marginalized communities is a crucial one. In a space like the Canadian arts community, which is traditionally dominated by white men, it can be a more accessible way for Asian artists (and more generally, marginalized artists) to promote themselves. It offers the ability for Asian artists to carve out their own identities—to be judged for their work rather than how different they look from everyone else at the art fair.

It’s no longer a strict requirement that artists follow the prescribed path of going to art school and hoping to be picked up by a gallery. Instead, they just need to go viral online.

***

Ness Lee’s apartment is a large collection of things. Some are things she’s created by herself, like the ceramic pieces spilling out of the drawers of her studio, but others are small gifts from her friends that have become themes in her space: vegetable-shaped pillows and stress balls propped up on the couch or hanging from a wall; small tortoise memorabilia in honour of her pet tortoise, Frank Ocean. She often mentions names of other Asian photographers and artists, people she says it seems like “everyone in the city” knows.

For artists like Lee, social media offers a way to connect with other Asian artists. Although it has a population of more than two million people, Toronto is tight-knit, and it’s evident the Asian artist community is no exception.

Ness Lee. Photo by Augustine Ng.

“Growing up, I had a lot of repression because I didn’t really have a way to talk to people,” she says. She explains that many of her friends came from immigrant families, and that they had languages they preferred to communicate in outside of English. Because she is Hakka, a Han Chinese diasporic group of about 80 million people, she didn’t know anyone who could understand her language. “I think [art] was just a way for me to talk to myself, or figure shit out,” she says. “Without me knowing it, I would notice I’d feel relief—it just felt good to make something, whether it was something shitty or not. It was a good way to work it out.”

Now, most of her connections are people of colour. “It’s really nice to have that kind of understanding from people,” she says.

For Lee, one drawback of having a following on social media, however, for Lee has been the following itself. Although her actual work carries with it a large personal weight, she says having a platform online—particularly her Instagram account, followed by more than 36,000 people—has made her unsure of sharing anything that isn’t art-related. “I want to make sure my voice is conscious and considerate,” she says. “I think my social media thing became more art, because I also can’t put my personal self into it anymore, because it’s just so scary.” She maintains a separate Instagram for personal posts, like photos of her feet.

She also struggles with guilt for her art receiving the attention it has—from her Toronto solo show, to a mural in partnership with Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black,” to the handful of other murals set up throughout the city. “I’m super thankful for it, but I’m wondering if I’m taking up too much space,” she says. She mentions impostor syndrome, a common phenomenon where sufferers feel unworthy of their own accomplishments, fearful they’ll one day be exposed as a fraud.

“Persistence is key. Staying curious, if you can afford to, is very key. Just being open, honest, and not superficial, I guess,” she says. “This social media thing. That whole conversation… It’s hard! I guess just, I don’t know, remember to be you.”

***

Shafi has had her own struggles on social media, particularly when one of her pieces went viral.

Set on a pink background, the piece features an ECG monitor line covered in flowers, with the words “Healing is not linear” written in bubbly lettering across it. The piece’s popularity jump-started her career in art, which, back then, was marked by on-and-off commitments to Facebook pages and Etsy stores. But since then, she says she’s been plagiarized numerous times; a Google search of the phrase yields multiple renditions and uncredited reposts of her original piece.

“I’m almost having trouble saying, ‘This is mine,’” she says, “especially when you’re a young woman and you’re putting your work out there.”

Photo by Augustine Ng.

But for Shafi, who didn’t feel like she belonged in the traditional arts scene, with growing online recognition came with it a larger number of Asian artists reaching out to her with support and encouragement.

“[They reached out to me like,] ‘Hey, keep pursuing this. Maybe not everyone is being super supportive of you, but you have potential, you can do this. Keep practicing,’” she says. “I learned just in my own experiences, the true importance of community and just really knowing your worth and making that known.”

Facebook has killed news.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced early last month that the network’s algorithm was changing to show “less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media” in users’ news feeds, instead highlighting personal posts that “encourage meaningful interactions between people.” The announcement cost him more than $3 billion of his own personal funds after Facebook’s stocks plunged, of which he owns more than 400 million shares.

The algorithm update indicates a dramatic change in the way users will consume their news—one that, ideally, is meant to curb the proliferation of fake news—but also in the way publications will have to promote their digital content. Facebook is no longer the audience gatherer it once was—and it hasn’t been for a while now.

Independent publications know this best. Created with the purpose of telling stories that may not be explored by mainstream media, Canada’s indie outlets know how to operate on a smaller audience and budget. And, in the ephemeral digital landscape, indie media has become accustomed to creating a community within the noise of the internet.

“Facebook has always been flawed. I think it feels less like a major change and a continuation of the fact that [digital media] just doesn’t seem like a priority to them,” says Haley Cullingham, senior editor of online magazine Hazlitt. She says Hazlitt’s Facebook strategy will not be changing after the announcement because its traffic mainly comes from people sharing its content organically, and from other social networks, like Twitter. “We’ve been very clear on the fact that we’re not going to change the fundamental tone and personality of the site just to accommodate the specific way the internet has provided [to best reach the audience],” Cullingham says. This is a strategy that other Canadian indie outlets, like Now magazine and the Tyee, share. For smaller publications, the focus has always been on the stories not told by mainstream media—not the likes and digital targets.

News outlets have long been warned against following algorithm changes too closely—as seen in Facebook’s push toward branded content, then image-heavy content, then video content, then its experimental (and largely ineffective) foray into live video. Companies that have dedicated resources chasing these trends have never seen the return on investment that they were promised.

“The danger of putting all your eggs in one basket is that someday, someone can just fuck up the basket,” says David Topping, senior manager of product at St. Joseph Communications. “Relying entirely on a social network that you have no control over, insight into or power to affect change with is always going to be a risky strategy. It’s not one that I would recommend.”

Topping says he hopes the new algorithm will encourage more originality and stronger dedication to meaningful content among publications. He warns that the recent trend of favouring clickbait and viral content may end up hurting outlets in the end. As publications inevitably move away from receiving funding from advertisers and shift toward asking their readership for money, he says “they will have spent so long reducing that value to that audience that, when the time comes … no one will care enough to do so.”

Michelle da Silva, online and social media manager for Now magazine, says her staff have been preparing for an announcement like this. Over the past two years, the publication has been devoting more resources into its digital platform. “Of course, we still have our print publication and that’s an important part of what we do and an important part of our legacy. But the only way forward is by making sure that you have a good digital strategy,” da Silva says. She says Now isn’t as affected by the algorithm change because Facebook clicks only account for about 10 percent of its total online traffic. Although it is still the “highest amount of traffic in terms of social channels,” the majority of its online hits come from Google searches, or people looking up the site directly—showing that, at least for indie mags, the concept of the “dead homepage” remains a myth for now.

This sentiment is shared by other indie publications, like Vancouver’s the Tyee. Bryan Carney, director of web production, says Facebook makes up around six to 10 percent of the publication’s total amount of online traffic in any given month. Although longer-term effects of the algorithm change are still yet to be seen, Carney’s first reaction isn’t to do a complete rehaul of his digital strategy. “You can watch the landscape and not necessarily throw money into promotion,” he says. “I think the winning way to do it is slowly build an audience rather than getting too excited about platforms.”

Carney mentions how Tumblr, the blogging site, was once touted as “the biggest thing that was going to take over Facebook.” Those rumours never came to fruition. He says, “We didn’t go and hire a Tumblr intern… and we’re probably pretty glad we didn’t.”

He also says that Facebook’s popularity, especially with advertisers, has devalued advertising on the Tyee’s site. “We’re not so tied to the fortunes of Facebook, nor do we feel any sort of loyalty to them,” he says. “It’s not likely there’s any love lost when it turns out Facebook will be less and less important for news. I hope this can be a positive development, that it’ll cause people to rethink the way we consume news and aggregate it and curate it… I think there’s a potential for this to be a positive in the industry for people to do something about it.”

The algorithm change could help slow down the breakneck speed of the news cycle. Misinformation and clickbait posts often come from the need to publish the most content faster than anyone else. If publications are phased out of readers’ news feeds, they’d need to find a new business model—one that, hopefully, relies more on publishing content that is more meaningful and nuanced than one-dimensional takes designed to go viral. However, it also does mean that people who have been using Facebook as a news aggregator may need to find an alternative. That includes more active support for digital content—like publicly supporting and sharing meaningful pieces, or subsidizing publications that commit to publishing them.

Ultimately, Facebook is putting the onus on the reader to go out of their way to find content that speaks to them—as it should be. Reading the news critically and evaluating different viewpoints should always be a conscious, active process instead of something done passively. And while the algorithm change represents a shift in the way news will be promoted and consumed, Canadian indie publications will survive using the same techniques that have kept them going in previous trying times: by creating meaningful niche content that personally speaks to its readers—and by not investing all their resources on a Tumblr intern.

In August 2015, Ala Buzreba, then the Liberal candidate for Calgary Nose Hill, was giving up her candidacy. Just 21 years old, Buzreba was trying to unseat Conservative Michelle Rempel. But that dream crumbled when a few less-than-savoury comments posted to her Twitter account during her high-school year surfaced—four years before she entered the political spotlight. “Just got my hair cut, I look like a flipping lesbian!!:’(” she wrote in June 2011. In another instance, she told someone on Twitter to “Go blow your brains out.” “I apologize without reservation for the comments I made a long time ago, as a teenager, but that is no excuse,” she publicly announced. She continued, asserting that the tweets “do not reflect my views, who I am as a person, or my deep respect for all communities in our country.” Despite the apology, she stepped down, the sting of a few sordid tweets leaving her deflated and unable to continue the race.

Welcome to the Generation of Too Much Information. We’ve all seen a child who can barely walk or use a spoon master an iPad. One consequence of this increasing ease with technology over the past decade is the presence of young adults who have only ever known a world in which personal information and images are circulated online— a world in which an online presence is deemed a necessity.

It’s easy to use social media platforms with reckless abandon to talk about relationships, work stresses, and our political views. In the last 10 years, social interaction has become even more publicly uncensored. Unconcerned and seemingly invincible, teens and young adults post without much thought. After all, what’s the worst that can happen? Who could possibly care? Poor judgment in what we post may very well lead to a digital legacy that’s less than admirable.

We are entering a new age of transparency with new rules about privacy and identity.

There are myriad other behaviours that are captured about how we drive (Tesla), what we buy (Amazon), who we communicate with (Google); we tacitly agree to give up privacy in exchange for convenience. Thomas Koulopoulos, author of The Gen Z Effect, says it’s not at all clear where this data may be stored, how it may be used, or who may ultimately have access to some derivative of it. “To those who say, ‘I don’t care because I have nothing to hide!’ I’d say think carefully before you give away a right you may never regain,” Koulopoulos says.

Offensive tweets and photos are bound to be part of our new political reality as Generation Z—those born in 1996 and onward—reaches adulthood. The effects of this hyper-connected and digital-first cohort therefore demand further scrutiny. We have yet to agree upon social, legal, and technical standards by which to navigate this new era of transparency.

Once seen as promising spaces for deliberation, Twitter’s hostile climate has provided a new arena for the enactment of power inequities by political parties. But Buzreba’s case is symptomatic of a larger problem on social media platforms. Is there really any room for apology online? Or is a remark made in 140 characters enough to typecast you as a foolish, inconsiderate imbecile?

In the wake of data protection and privacy laws, we can be fooled to think that what we say and do online can be fully erased. But our collective digital futures rests solely in our hands. We are unequivocally responsible for the online trail we leave behind.

***

In June 2017, a remarkable collision of free speech and toxic internet culture unfolded at Harvard University. The school rescinded the acceptance offers of at least 10 students after they reportedly shared offensive and obscene memes in a private Facebook group chat. Some of the memes shared in the private chat were sexually explicit, made light of sexual assault, and contained racist jokes aimed at specific ethnic groups. One thing is overwhelmingly clear: Social media platforms allow speech to persist, endure, and travel further.

“On one hand there definitely is the concern that everything we do is archived and things that you did before you knew better may come back to haunt you,” says Ramona Pringle, a professor in the faculty of communication and design at Ryerson University. But racist and sexist beliefs fostered in online forums that are spread on social media need to be acknowledged and addressed as a serious concern that cannot be cast away in the name of free speech. Pringle worries that it’s too easy to use the excuse that, “they’re just kids.”

“People who might want to engage thoughtfully feel like they can’t,” says Pringle. “The true value of online platforms is collaboration and cooperation, but we see less of it when there’s bullying, hostility, or toxicity of any kind.” It’s no secret that Twitter is notorious for its strong shaming culture. “There’s a difference between saying something damaging and saying something stupid,” she says.

We are mistaken to believe that most social media platforms—especially Twitter—were designed to be archives of the individual. Rather, their interfaces are designed to be a snapshot of a certain point in time in our lives, reflecting what we’re doing or saying, thinking, and sharing. Posting status updates is a sort of ritualized documentary practice that allows us to freely share what’s on our mind.

Pringle believes apologies don’t work on Twitter because our audience has already moved on. It’s a sentiment echoed by Greg Elmer, a media scholar also at Ryerson University and the Bell Media Research Chair. He says the way information is presented on Twitter is a relatively new format. Before the newsfeed, information was presented horizontally. If you watch a business news channel, for example, the bottom text always moves horizontally. With Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, information travels vertically and then “disappears.” Elmer calls this a “vertical ticker.” Vertical looped tickers highlight the fleeting nature of our networked and socially mediated communication, since they provide an intensely compressed time and space to have posts viewed by friends and followers. Whether we’re aware of it or not, he suggests there is a psychological effect to this vertical ticker. We are compelled to post something provocative enough that it will garner a reaction, ultimately revealing a more whole portrait of ourselves—but at what expense?

“The notion of privacy is completely meaningless,” says Elmer. In certain circumstances—increasingly on social media platforms—Elmer suggests that the privacy of users stands in direct opposition to the stated goals and logic of the technology in question. Companies like Facebook and Google are entirely predicated upon the act of going public. Elmer’s theory argues that uploading, sharing personal information, opinions, and habits is all part of “going public” in our social media age. Privacy is therefore only a hindrance to these processes. Let’s not forget that these online platforms profit from publicity and suffer from stringent privacy protocols—their goal is to learn as much as possible about users in order to aggregate and sell this targeted information to advertisers. While mass media has enjoyed a near monopoly on public attention, Elmer says today’s economy of attention is dictated by how we consume information through social media platforms.

When it comes to politics, though, the problem with sharing snippets of our lives on social media becomes twofold: Politicians can’t overshare, but their hesitation to share takes them out of the public eye when they need it most. In the case of Buzreba, the former Liberal candidate, there was a deep tension at the heart of party lines. Canada has an intensely risk-averse political climate. If a few tweets can falsely frame you as unfit to run for public office, this establishes a political culture that promotes bland people with little to no lived experiences to shape the direction of our country. Leaving no room for growth and forgiveness sends a clear message to young minds: In order to be in the public eye, you must be squeaky clean and continue to be squeaky clean from here to eternity.

Still, “I hope there will be more acceptance and forgiveness because the voting public will also have grown up posting online, so I hope they’ll be as fussy or sensitive to ‘embarrassing’ posts,” says Pringle. While she acknowledges that teens may have a proclivity for performative behaviour online, Pringle also points out that there’s a clear difference between a drunk selfie and a racial slur. In September 2017, YouTube megastar Felix Kjellberg, commonly known as PewDiePie, used the N-word during a live video stream. Games developers quickly condemned his behaviour—one even filed a copyright claim to order YouTube to remove some of Kjellberg’s videos. Despite the public outcry, many people came to Kjellberg’s defence, dismissing the event as a crime of gaming passion. In the political ring, we can only hope that constituents will be able to recognize the varying degrees of severity of online behaviour. As it’s becoming harder to separate our “real” selves from what we put online, what we do and how we express it affects these platforms just as much as they affect us. Harsh words, inebriated photos, and controversial opinions might be the status quo in cyberspace. But there would surely be less venom if people considered the words they write to each other online as having the same impact as those said face to face.

***

One thing’s for certain: We do not yet know all the consequences of growing up in a world where so much personal data has been circulated. In this culture of self-surveillance, privacy has been forfeited. But legal changes are attempting to claw some of it back. Laws surrounding the “right to be forgotten” illustrate the new challenges facing transatlantic lawmakers following the digital availability of personal data on the internet. The right famously came about by the Court of Justice of the European Union in its May 2014 landmark decision on Google Spain SL v. Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, when it authorized that an individual’s (in this case, a man named Mario Costeja González) personal information pertaining to past debts be removed from accessibility through a search engine. The ruling states that Google must delete “inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant” data from its results when a member of the public requests it. González succeeded after spending five years fighting to have his home’s foreclosure news articles taken down from Google’s search engine. The ruling led to a record number of requests from Europeans to remove personal data—involving close to 700,000 URL addresses.

Other countries, such as the U.K., have also taken steps to protect its citizens online. In August, updates to a data protection bill gave Britons the right to force companies that dominate the internet, like Facebook and Google, to delete personal data, or information posted when users were children. While social media is all about making a mark, the right to be forgotten is about handing over a different kind of power. It is asserting ownership of our identity by refusing to pass it over to corporations. There is a freedom in being able to delete some of our digital past—or in growing up without one.

In Canada, there are no laws in existence on the right to be forgotten or erased. If someone discovers a website that displays their personal information without their consent, they must contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. Meanwhile, critics say the ability to remove personal info from the web is an attack on freedom of speech and freedom of information.

But Canadian lawmakers have already passed laws that aim to supplement preexisting legal matters on defamation, the breach of privacy, and to solve specific online problems. This includes the Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act, which amended the Criminal Code to sanction the non-consensual publication of intimate images and harassing communication. In Nova Scotia, for example, the Cyber-safety Act allows for the prosecution of those who use electronic communication to cause harm or damage to the health, self-esteem or reputation of another person, to cause fear, intimidation, humiliation, or distress—in the wake of Rehtaeh Parsons’ untimely death.

***

Recognizing that we all make mistakes, especially when we’re young—and that a trivial photo or comment should not leave an indelible stain—is a characteristic of contemporary modern life. Online commentary can inform, improve, and shape people for the better, and it can alienate, manipulate, and shape people for the worse.

Can we encourage policies and technologies that are supportive of healthy discourse? Or should we be fostering a culture of moderation that will, in time, curtail online hostility and encourage forgiveness? These questions and more persist in academic circles.

There is no straightforward solution other than self-awareness. Drawing the appropriate line on the internet is tricky, but it must never be an excuse not to set parameters or to allow all manner of ongoing harassment, insults, and abuse. To abdicate moral responsibility in the face of bullies is to hand society over to the most vicious among us. We can be both understanding about the human propensity to outbursts, while at the same time insisting on norms requiring apology and a generally good behavioural track record over time by the organizations and the individuals representing them. Pushing young adults to withdraw from online activity partially or entirely has devastating consequences. At stake is their equality and participation in the increasingly significant public sphere that is the internet.

Todd McLellan’s Things Come Apart series features disassembled technology, both old and new, to explore our relationships with their disposable nature. As technology improves and we replace our gadgets at a rapid pace, what comes of the components that make it work? McLellan shoots each disassembled machine by dropping it from a platform, creating a stunning view of technology, inside out.

The next time you look at social media, I want you pay attention to a subtle detail on each post: the timestamp. If you’re on Twitter, for example, when was each post published? When I was writing this paragraph, I glanced down at my Twitter feed, and here’s what I saw: A tweet about a Chinese internet CEO acting nuts (53 seconds ago), a snapshot of a friend’s cat asleep in an inbox tray (one minute ago), a hot take on Hillary Clinton’s book (two minutes ago). And on and on, backwards into time, minute by minute.

This is what’s known as “reverse chronological” design, and it’s the organizing principle for nearly every social media giant. Log into Instagram, Facebook, a discussion board on Reddit, and just about any blog, and boom—it’s all reverse chron. They’re constantly refreshing the feed, pushing the newest, latest updates to you. History recedes in a flash. What happened last minute is immediately pushed away, as is last hour, and the last day. It makes it awfully hard to examine the past, even the quite recent past. If I wanted to see what my feed looked like, say, last week? I’d be sitting there scrolling backward until my forefinger fell off. Twitter doesn’t want me doing that.

These days, we’re warned about the myriad of ways that social media corrodes our culture. We worry about how it creates “filter bubbles” and fosters a rotting swamp of abusive trolls. We’re told it’s sapping our penchant for face-to-face human contact: “We have sacrificed conversation for mere connection,” as MIT professor Sherry Turkle writes. And hey, how about those gormless millennials? Their selfie snapping and relentless hustling for likes has become “a conduit for individual narcissism,” if you believe psychologist Jean Twenge, co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic.

Me, I’m not so sure. I’ve been writing about technology and its effects for two decades, and my sense is that many of these fears are overblown. Toxic trolldom is real, certainly; but fears that technology will turn us into numb, self-obsessed morons are as old as the hills. They’re likely driven more by intergenerational friction, the habitual scorn of the olds for the youngs.

If you asked me what the true danger about social media is, I’d say it’s much more subtle. It’s the problem of time—and becoming stuck in the present. It’s the relentless pressure of reverse chron.

And, weirdly enough, it’s a danger that pioneering Canadian communications theorist Harold Innis warned us about—over 60 years ago.

***

When we talk about Canadians famous for analyzing new media, we often think of Marshall McLuhan first. With his koan “the medium is the message,” McLuhan synthesized his basic idea: Our tools, from electric light to television to phones, change not just how we communicate, but what we communicate about.

But if you asked McLuhan, he would tell you that Innis got there first. In the 1920s and ’30s, Innis cut his teeth as an economist studying how Canada’s abundant resources—furs, wood, fish—shaped the country’s economy. Later on, he became one of Canada’s first red-hot cultural nationalists, inveighing against the way American art and military power warped Canada’s own industries.

Late in his career, though, Innis suddenly pivoted, becoming mesmerized by how media changed the timbre of our cognition. In The Bias of Communication, published in 1951, he went as far back as early Mesopotamians to analyze how their medium, clay tablets, affected the power of elites. Clay, Innis noted, was durable—it’ll last for aeons—but heavy and hard to move. As a result, any religious edicts written down in cuneiform would hang around for a long time, but wouldn’t reach very far, geographically. You can’t easily lug a thousand pounds of religious texts for a hundred miles. So power endured over a long time period, but each empire had a small radius.

The shift to paper, beginning with papyrus in Roman culture, inverted this proposition. Now, Innis noted, written-down rules and edicts and religious tracts were lightweight, so they could be carried for thousands of miles by horse. This is part of why the Roman Empire spread all the way up to Britain, and why—in the 15th century, when Gutenberg created the printing press—Martin Luther’s rebellious theses spread across Europe in a matter of months. Paper accelerated the spread of ideas. It was great for memes.

But paper also, Innis pointed out, made ideas transient. That’s because, compared to clay tablets, paper isn’t very durable. It fades, it gets ripped; the Library of Alexandria burns. Perhaps worse, from Innis’s point of view, is paper encouraged disposability. Once newspaper printing presses started cranking in 17th century—pushed into overdrive by steam power in the 19th—society was flooded with the weird new form of “daily news,” something you discarded immediately after reading.

Many regard early newspapers as cradles of modern democracy and human rights, and there’s obvious truth to that. But Innis worried that newspapers had a structural bias: They focused culture relentlessly on the present. To make money, newspapers had to train us to come back every day—to become convinced that if we stopped keeping up, stopped checking the papers, we’d miss something important, or mesmerizing, or, more likely, deliciously lascivious. (That’s partly why newspapers quickly discovered the allure of covering long-running trials: “It is doubtful whether anything really unifies the country like its murders,” as Innis quotes one 19th-century wit.)

Modern media was changing our relationship to time. It gave us “an obsession with the immediate… a criticism of the moment at the moment,” Innis argued, quoting Henry James. News media’s message, in the McLuhan-esque sense, was to stop paying attention to the past; hell, to stop paying attention to last week, or even yesterday. It was a format that “inevitably shrinks time down to the present, to a one-day world of the immediate and the transitory.” It made us creatures of “present-mindedness.”

A culture that is stuck in the present is one that can’t solve big problems. If you want to plan for the future, if you want to handle big social and political challenges, you have to decouple yourself from day-to-day crises, to look back at history, to learn from it, to see trendlines. You have to be usefully detached from the moment.

What Innis feared—as his biographer Alexander John Watson puts it—is that “our culture was becoming so saturated with new instantaneous media that there was no longer a hinterland to which refugee intellectuals could retreat to develop a new paradigm that would allow us to tackle the new problems we are facing.”

***

Which brings us back to today’s social media and its omnipresent reverse-chron design.

What in god’s name would Innis have thought of Twitter? He died in 1952, so on a sheerly technological level, smartphones and the internet would have seemed like distant, unfamiliar sci-fi. But if you showed him the way social media is organized? He’d probably wince in recognition. Reverse chron is present-mindedness jacked into hypermetabolic overload. Hey, someone said something 15 seconds ago! Now someone’s saying something else! Drop what you’re doing and check it out!

If you ask me, Innis nailed it. Present-mindedness is our biggest danger. Forget all the handwringing about our social habits; I doubt technology is turning us into much bigger narcissists than we already were. And politically, tech has had many wonderful effects—particularly when long-ignored voices have learned how to connect and persuade online. Black Lives Matter and the “We are the 99 percent” economic message of Occupy Wall Street, for instance, both blossomed via social media.

But reverse chron? That’s well and truly a mental trap. Social-media firms know this: They’re experts at hijacking our attention, sucking us into the day-to-day drama of whatever’s blowing up online right now. They use reverse chron because it’s so addictive.

It’s up to us to heed Innis’s warning, and fight back. On one level it’s a personal battle, seizing back control of our own attention: We have to learn to enjoy what’s powerful and delightful about online tools, but to resist their casino-like seductions into the here and now. Some of society’s biggest problems, such as global warming, require careful long-term planning; we can’t tackle them if we’re being dragged in 20 directions every hour by shiny objects and oven-fresh hot takes.

We could use better tools, too. Since their very design affects how we use them, how about forms of social media that don’t focus so narrowly on what’s happening right this instant?

Facebook and Twitter have recently tried to gently tinker with such experiments, occasionally highlighting posts from a few hours or days ago. But I’d love to see more designs that are even more radical yet.

How about this: When I post about a subject, have the social network show me powerful, useful related posts and threads from weeks, months, or even years gone by. Or remind me of thoughts or ideas I myself posted on the subject from years past; connect me with the history and trajectory of my own cognition. Or let’s be even more radical: Why not crawl through Google Books’ public domain archive and find me related work published on the subject in the 1900s? Imagine a social network with content that spans centuries!

This sounds a bit nuts, I realize, and utopian; I’ve no idea how you’d convince social-media barons to rejig their wildly profitable mechanics of reverse chron. But I suspect many people already have an appetite for posts, news, and material that drags them out of the present. Behold, for example, the weird success of @HistoryInPics, an account with more than four million followers that does nothing but tweet pictures of historical photos. (Even better, it was started by two teenagers; they’re now young twentysomethings.)

There’s no simple answer here. But it’s worth thinking about this subtle trap that social media has created. History is long, and worth learning from. It’s time we grappled with the problem of time itself.

On the morning of the U.S. election last November, I logged onto Twitter and spent several hours arguing about privilege—mostly white, but also male—with someone who believed the entire concept was, itself, racist and sexist because he “judges people individually,” systemic issues be damned. As often happens, the discussion devolved to me calling him “willfully obtuse” and 20 minutes later, “fucking stupid.” I’m not terrific at debating, but I am fairly certain of two things: privilege is real and nobody has ever been convinced of that on Twitter, even without name calling.

We all know how that day ended: with the the unfathomable, terrifying, and depressing culmination of a campaign that saw a brick heaved through the Overton window, followed by a molotov cocktail and several bags of dog shit. On November 9, several tech companies woke up wondering just what role they played in getting a neophyte demagogue elected to the office of President of the United States. Twitter, for its part, finally had to take a hard look at its service and its contribution to public discourse.

Its approach up to that point was mostly to avoid the question. Sure, they locked out “alt-right”¹ nihilist haircut Milo Yiannopoulos, but the cesspool of humanity he controlled just kept on keeping on in their unceasing war against “cuckservatives” and “libtards” alike. After the election, Twitter admitted its staff were having “challenges keeping up with and curbing abusive conduct,” added new controls for shielding oneself from such conduct (really, just a slightly more sophisticated version of the Twitter mute button), and started shutting down some of the more egregious “alt-right”² accounts. Delightfully, this caused several terrible people, such as actor-turned-racistuncle-to-the-entire-internet James Woods, to leave in a “free-speech” huff. But former “Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan” David Duke still gets to tweet, so let’s call the effort inconsistent at best.

Twitter is motivated to try and fix things. Last fall there were rumours that the company could be bought by Google or Disney or Salesforce or Microsoft, but nothing ever came of it. Which is fair—who wants to assume that much liability? Meanwhile, its problems seem like a more focused version of the web at large, where newspapers are shutting down comment sections and at least one major advertising network is pulling its service from sites such as Breitbart.

It’s getting easy to start thinking that maybe the entire internet was a terrible idea, and Twitter encapsulates that perfectly. The things that make Twitter fun and addictive—It’s instant! It’s pithy!—also strip complex subjects of any kind of nuance. Twitter rewards snark, invective, and cynicism, lighting up your brain like a slot machine every time someone clicks “favourite” or “retweets” you. More than anything, Twitter feels like all of the loudest people—including me—yelling at each other. Sometimes in agreement, sometimes in disagreement, but always, always yelling.

Could I be a better at debating issues with people on the Internet? Sure. It would just take a little patience, some empathy and a concerted effort to fight every instinct I have while scrolling my feed. But even then, I’m not sure I could convince the willfully obtuse or the fucking stupid that systemic racism and sexism actually exist.

Twitter, for all the time I spend on it—and genuinely enjoy it—just might not have the gestell for grown ups to talk about grown-up things. I suppose that’s why someone like Donald Trump enjoys it so much.

1 The “alt-right” is a big tent of awful people, including racists, misogynists and other assholes. Yiannopoulos’s specific brand of altright is the narcissistic pseudo-intellectual who gives the appearance of wanting to watch the world burn, but is really too shallow to care about much beyond their own microfame among white guys with bad opinions about ethics in video game journalism.

2 Real, actual, literal Nazis.