A few months ago, a camera team and a few reporters came to my home. They asked me a lot of questions! It took all day. I started out in a sweatshirt — after a few hours, I started sweating. But I had to keep it on, because of visual coherence. It was draining.
It was also scary. Was I saying the right things? Would I say something I regret? How do tell the truth as I see it without accidentally being hyperbolic, or inartful, or something else?
There was more than one reason I was sweating bullets throughout the whole thing.
I did it, though, because the reporting team was filming a documentary about social media, and they specifically wanted to talk to me. I felt like the national conversation was pretty simplistic, on the whole, and perhaps I could do my part in making it more sophisticated.
The show, Fault Lines, is also hosted on Al Jazeera, which I don’t love. (When you watch the show on YouTube, there will be a little disclaimer: “Al Jazeera is funded in whole or in part by the Qatari government”).
My on-camera time ended up being about 1 minute long, making pretty standard points. Something like: “virality is dangerous. You could change social media products to optimize for not just engagement and growth”. I hope the points I made during the other hours of footage helped nudge the overall project in a better direction.
Not sure how to feel, now that it’s over. I guess if nothing else, it was training for next time. Hopefully then it’ll be less scary.