Why I Write on Medium

I am a loner who wants to live in a commune. That’s called a paradox.

That is also why I write at Medium. My Message colleague Joanne McNeil is smart. She has written a very smart piece about Medium as a platform. She threw out a question the Message folks have been kicking around for awhile: why do we write here?

Each of us has a different reason for writing with the Message, which is a freewheeling stylized op-ed collective on Medium. I think of us a commune with lots of quiet rooms and no sign-up sheet for cleaning the shared kitchen. I write for the Message because that works for me in part because of how I think about the world.

My day job is solitary. I can spend months in a research field collecting data. I can spend another year analyzing, fixing, and understanding the data I have collected. If I am lucky I will spend another year publishing the thing I write about the data I collected and analyzed. I can also spend two years writing a book and a decade hearing back from a student who remembers my class fondly. I like all of that except perhaps the publishing timeframes. But I can even deal with that. It is a small price to pay for all the glorious alone time I get to have.

But, I am best when everyone around me is better. I like having smart friends. Smart friends make me feel stupid all the time. Then I work hard to be less stupid. Over time, I project that I will be less stupid because of my smart friends. In my day job my smart friends may meet at conferences. It is all very purposeful. You meet at a seminar. You listen in a seminar. You may ask a question in a seminar. You drink after the seminar. There is not a lot of space at these conferences for smart people to just collide.

Collisions are not purposeful. Collisions are better than purposeful. Collisions are spiritual. Two ideas slam into each other during a joke or a retelling and suddenly there is a new idea. Networks are pretty good for collisions. Bureaucracies are pretty bad for collisions. A lot of writing platforms have a network veneer slapped atop a bureaucracy. The tools — liking, sharing, social reading, takes — are freewheeling but the collisions aren’t there.

The things I think about are the consequences of or precursors of various collisions. When a new social media platform emerges, I think about how it will collide with structural inequalities like how we go to school differently or work differently. When social movements unfold on Twitter I wonder how they fit into the Civil Rights model and civil rights models. When black and brown kids are making their own movies on cellphones I wonder about their collision with media segmentation and financialization. To think about collisions it made sense to have a writing space where collisions are baked into the platform. But if I were going to write about those collisions, I could not forget about my day job. I wanted what I write to be accessible. I wanted it to reflect deep engagement with the world for my students and colleagues. I wanted to produce something that others could remix in their own collisions. JoAnne worries that Medium will lose the architecture that enable those kinds of collisions. It is a good thing to worry about.

I worry, too. I worry that when technology usurps public goods it will eat its way to the center from the edges. And, the edges are where vulnerable people live. I worry that shiny (shiny algorithms, shiny platforms, shiny apps) will become a euphemism for imperialism and racism and sexism and classism.

I figured I would need some help from smart people and more collisions than legacy media or blogging alone provide. Legacy media is good at feeling like a collision. Legacy media is not good at building architectures for actual collisions. Blogging lives but search ranking, apps, and changes in social reading means my home blog still gets good numbers but has far less collision than two years ago. Medium said I could write like a loner but collide in the Message commune. They also promised me a hedcut. I said yes.