Does your social media network spark joy?

Kem-Laurin Lubin, Ph.D-C
Human-Tech-Futures
6 min readAug 23, 2019

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Courtesy of Pixabay

More often than not my Medium posts come from festering thoughts and random conversations. These idea seeds then ignite an idea and then I rush to my laptop to create a skeleton for the post until I can flush it out sometime later.

Recently the general topic of social media has been at the forefront of pop culture, politics and society, at large. The conversations tend to discuss the detrimental effect of social media on society and how it has changed how we interact and communicate with those we encounter online.

Leading research tells us that in June 2017, 3.8 billion of the world’s 7.5 billion, used the internet and did so exponentially from previous years. Active social media users account for 2.89 billion people, a penetration of 39%. Active mobile social users are not far behind at 2.69 billion. Just barely 2 years later (2019) the Global Digital Report 2019 reports that the number of internet users worldwide is 4.388 billion, up 9.1% year-on-year. Of this, the number of social media users worldwide in 2019 is 3.484 billion, up 9% year-on-year. And these numbers are only expected to grow.

Digital Around the World 2019 — courtesy of https://www.smartinsights.com

Given this, it is clear that many of us spend a lot of time on social media for a variety of reasons; however, it begs the question: Does your social media spark joy?

Does your special media bring you joy?

A few months ago I posted, what is now one of my most-read posts, User Experience Designers — The True Fandom of Marie Kondo. In this post, I draw on the parallels of User Experience Design and the home managing tips extolled by organizing guru, Marie Kondo. In her #1 New York Times bestselling book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” Kondo took tidying to a whole new level, teaching everyday people that if you properly simplify and organize your home once, you’ll never have to do it again. Ultimately, Kondo suggests that a key aspect of deciding what to keep and what to throw away is asking yourself — does this object bring me joy?

Serendipitously, I recently run into an old grad school friend on the commuter train who loved the Marie…

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Kem-Laurin Lubin, Ph.D-C
Human-Tech-Futures

A Tech Humanist who writes about society, culture, tech, education & work futures. | am also a villager, and live in a small Canadian city., outside Toronto