Answers to a few common questions about content creation and consumption.
Experiments in battling a screen addiction
Got troubles with screen time? Here’s how I use Focus Mode, intermittent fasting & other steps to tackle the problem & have digital wellbeing.
How to bypass a Canva PDF text readability bug / issue
Can’t copy paste text correctly from the PDF you exported from Canva? Here’s a fix if you need your file to have searchable text like keywords.
The learned anxiety of crossing a road
City dwellers are conditioned to fear crossing the street, & car culture is behind it. But it need not be that way.
The Gravel paths to liberation
A few days ago, the beloved children’s author from Montreal, Élise Gravel, was in the news after a local library removed her books from their public shelves following pro-Palestinian posts on her social media account (for more details, here is the news story on the CBC website). The controversy inadvertently brought the old fear of censorship and banning books, (including, ironically, echoes of public book burnings in Nazi Germany,) and ultimately more attention to the Palestinian struggle itself. This article is a quick observation on how a large cause like this finds local acceptance, and gets amplified.
The censorship of Élise Gravel
Gravel has been a well regarded author of children’s books here in Quebec, with several popular titles under her belt, including Le Grand Antonio (The Great Antonio) about a Montreal strongman, and Une Patate a Velo (A Potato on a Bike). She writes in both French and English, and also illustrates her own work.
Ever since the violence escalated in Palestine, she has been consistently vocal about it and has repeatedly used her platform to demand an end to the genocide. Recently, the Center for Israeli and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) took offence to a post, (decided it had had it with her) and labelled her anti-Semitic. Gravel herself has posted about how much hate she had been getting simply for demanding peace.
It is following this declaration that the Montreal Jewish Public Library decided to move her books from their open shelves to closed stacks (although the library director claims this decision was taken even before he took charge in mid January, in another news article). Arguably, it’s not a case of total censorship as Gravel’s books are still available at the library, but the perception quickly formed among locals, both fans of her work and others, that the library was trying to curtail her freedom of expression. This galvanised more people to the cause, and a support gathering was organised to be held on Sunday, 11 February by a group of pro-Palestine Jews and other individuals.
A hundred-odd people, including several families with children, gathered outside the library premises at noon on an atypically warm winter Sunday, in support of Gravel and to denounce this attack on personal freedom. While the gathering was largely peaceful with slogans calling for a ceasefire, there was also some confrontation with a handful of pro-Israel supporters. Gravel posted about the gathering on her page but didn’t attend it herself.
International struggles and local resonance
This mobilisation was interesting because it is one of the many paths that eventually lead to freedom in Palestine. In the excellent essay ‘Sour Oranges and the Sweet Taste of Freedom’ (included in The Case for Sanctions Against Israel, a collection edited by Andrea Lim), the anti-Apartheid activist and later minister Ronnie Kasrils mentions how in the case of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement against South Africa, different strategies worked in different parts of the world. As he points out,
“The AAM (Anti-Apartheid Movement) was able to galvanise this depth and breadth of support because much like the liberation movement it flowed from, it was a broad front, providing a home to those of all colours, creeds and persuasions. All that was required was a commitment to working for apartheid’s demise. It tapped into issues that those on the ground could easily identify with. For example, in Ireland, it drew on the experience of the ravages of British colonialism, while in America it evoked the devastation of slavery and racism. It was also readily able to adapt its campaign methods, ensuring that they were relevant to specific conditions, recognizing that strategies appropriate in one local or national context were not necessarily effective in others.”
Similarly, while many Canadians may be apathetic or yet to take a public stand when it comes to this genocide, an issue like censorship and curtailing of freedoms can generate solidarity and bolster the main cause. Different groups in the country are working on multiple fronts – from blocking truck access to the Port of Vancouver, to protesters dressing up as Santa – in order to get the country to officially call for a ceasefire, and it is imperative to keep up the pressure.
Ask for an immediate ceasefire from your authorities. Speak to a protester rather than basing opinions solely from what you have been exposed to online (including this piece). And as Babasaheb exhorts, “Educate, organise, agitate.”
Double tagging French sheep and other causes of the revolution
Acts of civil disobedience emerging in our societies, and hopes for great peoples’ movements.
Eating animals
An essay on the dilemma of meat consumption, touching on climate change, ethics, caste, etc., based on the books I’ve recently read.
Cycling in Montreal: The good, the bad, the bumpy
A blog about the things I like and dislike about cycling in Montreal. This writing is like my riding: purely for leisure.
ChatGPT: Writer’s friend or archnemesis?
If you have been on the internet in the past month or so, you will have heard of ChatGPT. Everyone, from Twitter to bosses to LinkedIn to flatmates, seems to be talking about it. A revolution is coming, and like many other professionals, commercial content writers are on the cusp of this sea change. So here are my unsolicited two cents.
Resistance is futile
We are not the only people who are or will be affected with this technology so first things first: It is at times pointless standing in front of the wheels of change as they march forward. For millennials like me, several such industry-upending changes have occurred within our own lifetimes. We have lived through the age of floppies and CDs (remember the burning software Nero?), pirating music, going from an analog camera to digital to smartphones, and ironically even this, blogging. Things that were once central to our lives, we look back on with nostalgia now.
The anxiety
As a content writer for small businesses, I am at the frontline of this upheaval. So, like any big change, these are mentally taxing times. As the portal catches on, a lot of businesses, especially smaller ones, will find it more economical to get their content written by artificial intelligence than paying a human to do something slightly better. This will render many unskilled writers – and as a profession with an imperceptible entry barrier, we have a fair share of them – jobless. In fact, this will become the entry barrier and the writers who want to survive will have to hone their craft and develop a voice that does much better than the computer programme.
Infusing personality
However, if you have a business, you also know it’s important to differentiate yourself. Hence, if you are considering using ChatGPT for your branding, you would know that while it can give you plain vanilla but SEO optimised content to populate your website, you will still need to layer it with your brand’s personality. ChatGPT content should act as template, not the end-product itself. Writers should also embrace it as such; rather than thinking of AI as a direct competitor, we should use it as an efficient research resource.
Keeping AI on its toes
Ultimately though, AI will be able to write in a very specific tone of voice too (what with people even training them to write songs and movie scripts like a particular creative). This is especially the case if you consider your brand’s personality as something static and constantly put out content in a single tone of voice. Because like the imperfect humans who created them, brands can’t be static or perfect, and their language needs to keep evolving.
For instance, if you define your clothing brand’s personality as “quirky but sustainable”, and keep that aspect central to your communications over a long period of time, AI will eventually learn and codify your brand language and be able to produce copy in that unchanging tone. And eventually, your customers will be bored with the sameness of the content.
Temporary relief
A silver lining to this dark cloud is the fact that writing is catered to actual people. Yuval Noah Harari in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century says that algorithms like those on search engines are getting more powerful and we are producing things to appease them, and not really people (looking at you, SEO writing).
However, the jobs that cater to humans – like nursing, the care of children and the elderly, philosophers and ethicists – are likely to be the ones that will still be needed, he feels. Commercial writing, like advertising copywriting, is still targeted at people’s desires and insecurities. As long as we make such human decisions as buying jewellery or donating to charity, writers will still wield some power.
My takeaway
AI will take over writing a lot of the generic content that appears on the internet while human writing will need to go back to its roots of writing for people, rather than solely for algorithms (time to up your game, SEO writers). This will help businesses pick out good writers who can infuse the brand’s personality in their content.
For more such anxious reflections on everyday things, and to watch the process of a writer experiencing an identity crisis in real-time, keep reading this blog.
No robots were harmed during this thought exercise.
5 years of Intermittent Fasting and how I do it
My multi-year experiment with intermittent fasting or time restricted eating, with notes on the personal changes I’ve observed.