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Matthew S.'s avatar

On the Hank Green topic, this is one area where I think social media, but especially Twitter, has absolutely flattened the world, right? I'm kicking 40's door down in terms of age, and when I was a kid the best interaction a fan could really hope for was to send a letter and get a stock response, or maybe go to a convention depending upon your fandom.

Child me would have never dreamt that when I was an adult I would have the ability to reach out to an author when something was unclear in a book and have a halfway-decent chance of having the author clear it up. And not just respond, but there are folks I am a *fan* of who have had whole-ass conversations with me, and 8 year old me is still wowed by it.

I'm actually experiencing what the author is describing second-hand at the moment, as far as thinking about relationships to content creators. My son is almost 16, and got really heavy into Minecraft when he was like 5, and that's when there was this giant explosion of MC content for kids. So I followed a bunch of these folks on Twitter as due diligence as a parent, and never unfollowed them, and it's been a weird, semi-nostalgic emotional journey for me to see these folks who were such an important part of my kid's childhood grow and leave those things behind the same way my son has.

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