Hobbyist Academia #46
A few months ago I wrote about how touchpoints are the basic building blocks of connection. The next step up from a touchpoint is spending time with someone. After seeing someone in your extended network or community a handful of times, someone suggests coffee. Punctuating a series of text messages with a friend is an afternoon of hanging out, or getting together for dinner. Along the backdrop of a community event, you might have the chance for a quality catchup with a small subset of people.
Spending time with a friend usually requires making plans ahead of time, but sometimes conditions align for a spontaneous walk or meal. To achieve the spontaneous hangout, you have to make many attempts, knowing that those attempts may fail, and extend the invitations anyway.
Quality time with a friend can be in person, but it can also be mediated by technology. The goal is to spend the highest quality form of time with someone as is reasonably possible. A FaceTime chat or a long phone call with a friend who lives on the other side of the country absolutely counts. So does a video call when schedules and logistics make an in person gathering not reasonably possible. When you can, of course, try to spend that time in the real world, outside of screens and cameras and speakers.
Systems can help you stay on track with who you want to spend time with, when, and how often. You can aim for quarterly lunches or weekly phone calls. Being thoughtful and intentional about spending time with people increases the likelihood that it will happen, and it will deepen the relationships that make you feel connected in a hybrid world.
Read
Katherine Goldstein’s recent newsletter edition as part of her newest initiative, The How to Find Your People Club, establishes an important premise that there is no time-optimized way to build community. Rather, the very nature of how community is built requires a long game of showing up, even when it’s not strictly “productive” or when it seems like it’s not working.
I have a long standing love for bookstores- the actual, physical stores that sell actual physical books. I have a particular affinity for independently owned bookstores that also have cafés inside and that host community events and author talks and book signings. The Departure is a travel newsletter, and a recent newsletter featured a global guide to the best such bookstores to visit. (I was further delighted to see my own childhood bookstore included on the list!)
Engage and Interact
Amelia Wattenberger created an excellent, immersive piece combining writing and animation to explore our collective transition from physical interactions with machines to frictionless, screen-based interfaces, what we’ve lost along the way, and how we might take this opportunity to reimagine how we interact with technology.
Listen
A recent episode of the podcast Your Undivided Attention was an academic deep dive into Neil Postman’s writings and ideas about media ecology. He focused on television, but his work easily applies to our present media landscape and our understanding of the bidirectional impacts of media on culture and society.
Sari Azout of Sublime was recently a guest on the podcast Follow the Rabbit, talking about personal taste and curation as what remains uniquely human in the age of AI.
Watch
Brandon Vaidyanathan, sociology professor and creator of the Beauty at Work podcast, recently moderated a panel conversation with Robert Putnam and Sherry Turkle discussing loneliness and social isolation. Putnam and Turkle are key figures in the digital sociology conversation, both authors of multiple books and holding professorships at Harvard and MIT respectively. Their conversation here offers historical context to our current moment, with a framing of hope for the future.
Save This for Later
[I will receive a small commission should you purchase a book using the Bookshop links included in the newsletter or through my Bookshop collection, where you can find almost all the books I’ve included in the newsletter so far. Bookshop is an Amazon-alternative online bookseller that supports independent bookstores in your local community.]