On Social Media & how I use it – Jan 8 2026

[The most important thing happening right now is not at all what’s below; the most important thing is that people are out protesting the killing of Renee Good. My family was at a protest, I’m on a mini-retreat to get myself organized for the semester, hence this post.]
I’ve been stuck on posting on social media, for a bunch of reasons, but I am planning to be back now to posting more regularly.

One reason was that I have this report coming out that I have worked *really* hard to get just right, and it’ll be released later this month, and I was stuck on how to be strategic about talking about it – but I’ve now remembered that when I try to be strategic I am often less successful than when I’m just honest, so I will just talk about it here & elsewhere as I feel moved to. (I also have a lot of support for things like building a website for the report, connecting with organizations that might be interested, media outreach, etc – so there’s plenty of strategy happening, I’m just not going to let “what’s the best approach” stop me from posting on my various feeds.)

Another reason was – so many places to post! And so many of them are run by awful people and/or corporations that I don’t want to support, but also I do want to be in conversation with many of the people using those platforms. But I found a thingy that helps coordinate posting & I may use that, and also my participation isn’t going to make or break [insert the corporation here] – many people whose ethics I think are sound are on many of these platforms, and have orders of magnitude more followers than I ever will have.

And then there was just the fact that scrolling any of the social media sites frequently makes me feel bad, whether because of all the awful news, the squabbles and worse among people who are broadly on the same side, or the thing where everyone posts their best news and pictures and so on and so it seems like everyone’s having a better time than you are. But *interacting* on social media often makes me feel good, and the way to do that is posting. So.

So: my plan is to post in all the places I’ve got accounts, when I have something substantive to say – as well as on my own blog at my website. I have things to say about who votes & who doesn’t, and being trans at this moment in the US, and the class I’ll be teaching this semester & the book I’m working on for Polity Press (linked to the class), and my other research on social class & its intersections with race and politics, and my mom, and my general sense of what’s happening in the US and what we can and should be doing to try to build a better democracy than we have yet had in this country.