FranklinTaggart.com

▼▼▼ Watch the video below ▼▼▼ It Started With the Question, "Is This Really How I Want to Spend My Time?" I joined Facebook and Twitter in 2009, at the height of a personal health crisis. They were both much different experiences then. I was friends with people I wanted to connect with and hear from, and when we posted, our friends did see it. It was fun to get reacquainted with people all the way back to elementary school. And it was an important place to connect while I was facing a lot of uncertainty in my life. Overall, it felt like a pretty positive and uplifting place to be - until election time. The first couple of elections we went through on social media revealed some pretty horrible things about pretty much all of us. In order to stay in that environment, I had to start filtering what I was seeing. Longtime friends were unfollowed, unfriended, and blocked because I felt directly attacked by their vitriol. I started to realize that if they knew how I really felt, I w...

I've been online since 1995. I've seen all kinds of platforms come and go, from Usenet groups to AOL and Yahoo groups, to MySpace, to every iteration of Facebook and Twitter. I'm late to the Instagram and Pinterest game, and I was possessed by the recent success my friend Meridith Grundei has had on TikTok to just take a look. Social media platforms haven't been easy places to build and maintain good quality relationships for the most part. They change too frequently and they seem to benefit by staying more than moderately chaotic. I participate in a few groups where great conversations happen, but other than those, I'd rather spend time elsewhere. I think we need to build our communities so that they're social media proof. I'm not convinced that email is the answer but in the midst of all the commotion, there are pockets of great communities that would be good no matter where they showed up. The Interact Community is the one I mentioned in the Coffee Break....