Social media practice review, July 2025
Hallo again, Substack
For some years now I have been taking a look at my use of social media sometime near the end or start of the year and sometime near the middle of the year. In these social media practice reviews I try to describe what I do with social media, consider why I do so, evaluate my reasons, and articulate my own criteria for good enough practice. My most recent previous review was in January 2025.
For the past few years I have been active on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. At the beginning of this year I dropped out entirely from Twitter/X and very recently I significantly increased my use of Substack.
Twitter/X
It turns out I completely stopped using Twitter/X over the past six months and I don't miss it at all.
My use of Facebook over the past six months has looked very similar to what it did in the previous eighteen months. I interact with my family (who are spread around the world—currently in South Africa, New Zealand, and Canada) and celebrate significant family events such as birthdays, baptisms, weddings, and the commemoration of deaths. I interact with members of my church (mostly folks in my local parish and diocese or in the Anglican Dominican religious order). And I promote publications, events, and courses connected with my school (the Institute for Christian Studies, an interdisciplinary graduate school where the gospel's message of renewal shapes our pursuit of wisdom, based in Toronto). One innovation is that I now also use Facebook to interact with my co-participants in a Sunday evening online book group that reads the new English translation of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1. I continue to belong to Facebook groups about some of my interests, although my attention to those groups is even more low key than in the previous six months. I really only look at pictures people post about hiking in the Dolomites.
My first reason at present for using Facebook as I do remains that I want to maintain connections with family, church, and book group folks in between the opportunities we have to be together on site or by online video. My second reason is another innovation: I want to share some of my actions and positions with the roughly two hundred people with whom I am friends on Facebook as a means to hold myself accountable for what I do (for example, when I vote in elections). I call these posts “For the record,” and in each of these posts I briefly state an action or position I have taken, offer a reason, contextualize that reason, and explain why I have declined some of the possible alternatives. I had hoped to be called out a little more than has been the case! My third reason is to amplify the efforts of my school colleagues in sharing our work with the world. I continue to think that these are good enough reasons for using Facebook and that limiting my use of the platform to these uses protects me from the worst of the damage that the medium has inflicted on the world and, perhaps more importantly, limits the damage I can inflict on the world by means of this medium.
Here are my current criteria for my own social media practice on Facebook:
I try to limit my Facebook friending to people with whom I have a current and direct personal connection through these four communities: family, church, school, and book group. The rare exceptions are a handful of personal friends with whom I have live conversations at least once a year. I think of my personal Facebook page as a kind of virtual kitchen table, surrounded by people I know (or would be happy to know) off Facebook.
I mostly limit my posting to the celebration of significant events in these four communities: family, church (including my parish, diocese, and the Anglican Dominican order), school, and book group. I don’t keep these posts private, but I don’t post for the attention of people with whom I am not friended on Facebook. My reposting of my school’s new Substack publication on Facebook is mostly also for the attention of my friends, although, again, I don’t keep those posts private.
The exception is my “For the record posts,” in which I document and explain actions and positions I have taken, usually on matters of public concern. The purpose of these posts is to hold myself accountable (to my own future self and in conversation with my friends) and for this reason I limit access to these posts to people with whom I am Facebook friends.
I limit the time I invest in Facebook to a few random minutes outside of working hours each day, which allows me to keep up with what the folks in my family, church, and school communities post. The exception, again, is my “For the record posts,” on which I spend enough time to be satisfied with the clarity with which I have articulated my thinking.
My use of Instagram over the past six months has again looked quite similar to what it did in the previous eighteen months, consisting mostly of looking at the posts and stories of family and friends and posts about gardens in England and America and about hiking in the Dolomites.
My use of Instagram is otherwise less carefully curated than my use of Facebook, although I limit myself to looking at the posts of accounts I follow, ignoring the contents of the feed the platform proposes to me. My own posting on Instagram remains infrequent.
My Instagram account remains private, which means that it is only available to people who follow the account. As with Facebook, I no longer accept follow requests from accounts I don’t follow or from people with whom I have not had a conversation in the preceding year.
I continue to enjoy sharing the music to which I listen on Spotify while working in my Instagram stories, although my listening to music while working has diminished some in recent months because of changes in my workplace habits. I still automatically forward all my posts and stories on Instagram to Facebook, although sometimes that does not work, for no reason I can discern.
My criteria for my own social media practice on Instagram remains what they were in July 2024:
Beyond the posts and stories of family and friends I limit my attention on Instagram to beautiful pictures, mostly of gardens and mountain hiking paths.
My own Instagram posts celebrates significant family, church, and school events, significant feasts in the Anglican church year, the flowers Danielle and I buy for our apartment, and the Seasons of Yggi, the tree outside our living room window.
I look at Instagram whenever I want the lift of a little beauty, and it almost always leaves me a little more delighted and a little more courageous.
Substack
My use of Substack increased dramatically as of June 2025, prompted by a request from my colleagues that I contributed a weekly post to my school’s Substack publication. The discipline of weekly writing and the pleasure of tracking the readership of my posts intensified my involvement on the platform, so that it has become necessary for me to articulate my criteria for my own social media practice on Substack.
My writing on Substack for my school is opinion journalism. In it I try to contribute to the public discourse from the perspective of my scholarship: as a philosopher I think about the stories we humans tell to account for what we do in terms of what we want, to inform my study of what is good for humans, taking into consideration what is good for the whole earth.
I also write personally on Substack in what I call The Orange Notebook (which is where I am posting this review). My primary personal use of Substack is to find, regularly read, and occasionally celebrate a handful of journalists who write on faith, ethics, politics, gardening, literature, and philosophy. I want to celebrate what makes me think, smile, or cry in the work of these journalists by restacking their work, with my brief comments, as notes.
My secondary personal use of Substack is to use The Orange Notebook as a commonplace book. I love what I get to read, and I don’t write enough professionally to celebrate my reading adequately, so I will try to regularly post sentences or paragraphs from my reading. My criterion for these quotes will be that they make me think, smile, or cry.
And my tertiary and infrequent personal use of Substack is to reflect on my practices. I have an established habit of reflecting on my media diet and social media use twice a year, and to reflect on the music to which I have listened once a year. My professional work includes the writing of an annual reflective practice report. I have started reflecting on my faith practices four times a year on the Ember Days of the Canadian Anglican liturgical calendar. I intend to publish or mention some of these reflections in The Orange Notebook, because the Substack format seems more congenial for that purpose than the other platforms I use. We’ll see how that goes.
My opinion journalism on Substack will be informed by my scholarship and intended primarily to help professing Christians think about their political responsibilities.
My personal reading on Substack will be limited to a handful of journalists who write on faith, ethics, politics, gardening, literature, and philosophy, and whose writing makes me think, smile, or cry.
My personal writing on Substack will mostly celebrate what I am reading, usually in the course of my scholarship or as a part of my faith practices.
Regularly, once or twice a year, I will publish reflections (or invite readers to request my unpublished reflections by email) on various sets of my own practices: at a minimum, my media use, my music listening, my scholarship, and my faith practices.
Discord
I continue to use Discord only to nurture academic community at my school. The primary way in which I do this is to use the video lounge once a week on Friday mornings to be present with colleagues as we do our academic writing. While I managed to maintain that writing schedule pretty nicely from January to April, other work obligations reduced the number of Fridays available for my writing in May and June.