BIG ANNOUNCEMENT! After more than a year of planning, testing, and preparing, we have launched Guilds inside The Foundry. I'm looking for more Guild leads and men to band together and take this to the next level!
Media is severely disrupting out ability to attach to a family the way we should and it's leading to an epidemic of anxiety and depression. Here's what you need to know.
So, Elon has bought Twitter, making Twitter a potentially awesome comeback story. In this Foundry Friday episode I share some thoughts on this and some cautions if you decide to jump back into Twitter now that it's more open to free speech.
Social media is absolutely wrecking our kids. In just about every measurable way it is having a negative impact on them. It's harming their ability to connect in the real world, their sleep, their moods (depression/anxiety numbers are soaring), and even their health.
And while it's not just our kids who have an issue , it is their generation that doesn't know a life without social media.
Parents need to wake up and take this seriously.
I tried it. Hated it. But there's more to TikTok than it simply not being a good fit for me. Here are some thoughts on what it's doing to us and why I believe it's wrong for the future of human social interactions.
The Foundry kicked off in August of 2021 and since then we've grown and have some pretty awesome guys involved. Here is an inside look at what we have going on currently and what is coming up in 2022.
People generally go with the flow. Whatever the easiest path is, or the most popular path, that's the one they take. We've already seen folks making jumps to other popular alternative platforms like Gettr, Rumble, and Parler (if that is still a thing).
But, is this enough change to really make a difference?
We all see the mess that is social media, even before they began openly deplatforming and banning conservative voices. Big social made a quick shift from simply a means of connecting with people and brands we admire, to being a marketplace that is aggressively pushing a liberal agenda and squashing free speech.
In order for any social platform to be successful -- even real life ones -- it has to be based on shared values. Otherwise, it will end up with folks fighting about their disagreements rather than positively engaging with their community.
There's simply nothing like meeting people IRL (in real life). Even a short exchange can add gravity to our online relationships and should be something we pursue. Don't allow online relationships to become the new standard of friendship. True friends make time for one another and are willing to go the extra mile (or miles) to connect.
In this episode I use my powers of prognostication to predict the future of social media. Interestingly enough, the future looks a lot like the past and removes power from the big tech companies.
Growing up in the 80s, as I did, television was meant for families. So many of the shows were geared towards showcasing family values and generally had a moral for each episode. They were incredibly entertaining, but also added value. Valuetainment. We need more of this and less twaddle.
When we first showed up to social media, we likely had a common intent: to share our lives and connect with others doing the same. But the progressive platforms had a different intent, one that began to reveal itself about 3 years ago.
For any online community to work, there has to be a value alignment. We currently don't have that with FB, IG, TW, and others. It's time for a change.
Introducing Foundry Fridays! For the next several weeks we'll drop a new episode related to social media, the problems, and the solutions. Check out what we're doing to address this at https://wolfandiron.com/thefoundry.
FF01. No one has ever been taught how to do social media. Very few people are properly taught how to engage in a productive conversation. In short, we've given millions of poor communicators a platform to showcase their shortcomings. We can do better.
Welcome to Foundry Friday! On Monday, Oct 4th, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all went down for several hours. It's particularly bad timing given the "whistleblower" that came out the same day. But is that what's really going on?