Blog: Flexing The Gram

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As part of the ongoing Promotional Campaign for Data and Doctor Doom I have once again been trying to grapple with Social Media. This is something I don't really like doing, but feel I sort of have to after spending SO MANY MONTHS working on the podcast, like if I Current Me didn't do it he'd be letting down poor, young, naive Me Of Earlier This Year who put all that effort into making it.

The reason I don't like it is because it's such BLATANT self-publicising. Now, this may not be obvious to the casual observer, but I do quite like NON-BLATANT self-publicising (e.g. publishing over 4,000 seperate blog entries about ME). However, it's the fact that it's so obvious that what I'm doing is trying to get people to LISTEN to something that puts me off. I always feel that it's RUDE to barge in on everyone else's normal chit-chat to go "Yes but listen to MY things!", which I realise is a little bit daft in the current social media landscape, but it's still there.

Anyway, I have FORCED myself out onto the airwaves so to do, to somewhat different results. Bluesky, for instance, has been a DELIGHT, as ever reminiscent of Twitter from about 10 years ago when people would SAY things for humorous or public knowledge purposes and everyone would either go "Oh that's nice/interesting" or just ignore it. X Formerly Known As Twitter is just HORRID though - I haven't had any awful experiences or anything, it's just that when you go onto the site itself it's like you're stepping through a field that has recently had some nervous COWS in it, with really quite extraordinary OPINIONS dropped onto the grass of discourse (metaphor) everywhere you tread.

The main format I have been trying to properly grapple with this time though has been INSTAGRAM. I've had an account there for YEARS but have largely ignored it, popping over every few months or so to see if it makes any more sense to me yet and then finding it doesn't. I mean, I THINK the idea is to stick pictures on there, but I've never really understood why you'd do so or how people are meant to consume it, so my profile page has always been a selection of brief SPLASHES of pics about a year apart each time, a historical record of me repeatedly trying it out before retreating, perplexed.

Currently, however, it is MORE than a splash, for I had a sudden REALISATION a few weeks ago that I have a whole SLIDE SHOW full of images from the live version of Data and Doctor Doom which I could fiddle with to make into a whole SERIES of shareable images. My resolution to have a go at Instagram with this was INCREASED HUGELY when I worked out a way to FORMAT the slides in a way that would make them the correct size for Instagram AND still look as I intended them to so do. You can see the results on my account NOW!

I was so DELIGHTED with the results that I went further and REVAMPED my old PhD Process Blog Account on twitter-as-was into a "Data and Doctor Doom" one instead, and used THAT to plug the show with the same images.

To be honest I'm not sure if it's particularly WORKED at all, but it HAS been quite a nice experiment, not least because it's given me YET MORE transferable skills which may come in handy later. If nothing else it means that I've been able to re-use some of those SLIDES and put them out into the PUBLIC ARENA!

posted 3/9/2026 by MJ Hibbett

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