To heal our culture, we need to reclaim our news feeds and collaborate to reinvent social media. The loss of many local newspapers, combined with the tendency for our “Big Tech” social media news feeds to polarize and isolate us, have produced a bitter harvest. We can and must do better.
This evening I participated in an online webinar hosted by NCTIES, part of a free, autumn conference for educators sponsored by our statewide educational technology advoacy organization in North Carolina. The session highlighted new updates to Google’s NotebookLM AI platform as well as Google’s Gemini AI engine, including “Gemini Storybook.” I created a short, 3.5 minute / 10 page picture book titled, “The Good Boy Gazette.” You can read it, listen to it and view it both on YouTube and on Google Gemini.
This was my storybook prompt, altered only slightly with the final sentence added after I noticed all the people shown in the first draft of the story were white folks:
Tell an adventure story of the golden retrievers, Rosie and Moose, who found a way to help the United States transcend this moment of political polarization and rising fascism, by moving toward an ethic of kindness, love, and caring for our neighbors. The creation of an open source and federated social media platform engineered to promote good local news in the feed was key to this process! Make the images of people ethnically diverse.
The heroes of this story are Moose and Rosie, our real-life golden retrievers. Here’s a recent photo of them after baths this past Saturday.
Fortunately, the ideas in this short AI-powered picture book and story are not fairy tales. Many people ARE working to reclaim and reinvent social media, and re-establish community connections and news feeds which are vital to thriving neighborhoods. Some of the podcasts and podcasters I recommend following and subscribing to, who are doing this work, include:
I recently used “vibe coding” (coding with AI) to create a dynamic, hourly-updating feed of links to newsletters to which I’m subscribed. The project is called “Federated Reader,” and it’s available as a Mastodon channel and on GitHub. You can read more about it on my professional blog on, “DIY Federated Reader.” As a Mastodon channel, you can also add it to your own subscriptions on Flipboard, which is my favorite iPad / tablet and iPhone / smartphone app for reading and “consuming” news.
I’ve also added a link to “Federated Reader” on the “Trusted Voices” page of ResistAndHeal.com. Serving as “media filters” for each other, like this, is SO important, living as we do in an information environment filled with pollution, noise, and misinformation… but also inspiring and excellent ideas.
We all have roles to play in reclaiming and reinventing our news feeds. In addition to subscribing to the podcasts I’ve linked above in PocketCasts or your own favorite podcatcher, I recommend you start using SubStack. Create an account, download the app, log in and start subscribing to creators and journalists you’ve heard about and trust. Follow and subscribe to “Heal Our Culture” on Substack, and consider subscribing to other newsletters I write there. As you use the app and website, notice and subscribe to other channels the people you already follow “restack” and amplify.
It’s time to reclaim our news feeds. The good news is, there are lots of people we can join who are already doing this important work!
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