01 - Tokyo Tower 🗼
01 - Tokyo Tower 🗼
Thoughts on Social Media and my first bike ride around Tokyo.
See that title? There is a number there. I was thinking about the title and then I realized - wouldn't it be cool to have a goal to make it to a certain amount of posts? Maybe 42. We'll start with that for now.
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It's Surprisingly Green around Tokyo Tower
This week was the second week of my Japanese language school's 夏休み (natsuyasumi =“summer vacation”). I used the chance to go on my first bike ride around Tokyo with Satsuo - a family relative of M’s.
Tokyo is so big (I heard once it’s like 10 NYCs side by side) but a bike made it smaller. But still a huge mass of never-ending concrete. Satsuo said it takes a whole day to get out of the city on a bike (you can’t take a bike on the train).
From Meguro-ku (SW Tokyo) we biked ~8km to Tokyo Tower in Minato.
I didn't expect to go up the Tower but in broken Japanese I asked Satsuo if it was a good view (いい景色? - "good scenery"). He said he preferred it over Tokyo Skytree, so I thought it must be nice. So we went up.
The viewing platform is not so high, but there is surprisingly a nice mix of greenery and buildings.
Looking east/southeast you can see the temple and a park. Tokyo Bay in the distance. A stereotypically Japanese mix of modern buildings and old temples.
Looking northeast you can see Tokyo Skytree in the distance and the Prince Hotel (probably famous? it looks like it would be) down there on the right. There are a few temples in the area which accounts for the greenery.
We finished the ride around Imperial palace which has a nice hill climb on the north side. Then parted ways to our respective homes - about another hour for us both.
On Instagram, I Found Another Person Who Doesn't Know How To Use Instagram Anymore
M and I talked about social media this week, how our human brain can’t handle the hyper-connectedness of the internet, and then this post came up that echoed some of what we were thinking:
Facebook sucks because it's all life updates or divisive politics, it seems that over time the posts trended towards these types as the user base grew and the algorithms prioritized the most clickable & scrollable content. When all your different friend circles are on facebook you can't post anything but identity politcs or life updates. It doesn't seem like the place to post something that "doesn't matter".
I've grown not to use Instagram either, mostly because it seems too filtered, too much of a popularity contest, too much of an advertising spot for the newest boutique direct-to-consumer shoe company. But I did recently make a new account for Japan related stuff. Then I showed it to a potential friend in Japan and it seemed like they were weirded out that I only had 3 followers. But they didn't have any photos, which I thought was weird.
Then I learned that younger people in Japan only use IG for direct messages... Keep up with the times おじいちゃん！(="grandpa" ).
I hear TikTok is different, that on TikTok you can share anything, it's more raw and off the cuff. But I'm looking for a middle ground, somewhere between "raw videos of your morning cup of joe" and "look at my backpacking trip across Southeast Asia".
That's where N2D comes in. Of course it's curated to an extent, since writing takes time and forces me to draft a narrative. But here, I am not comparing my narrative against others. I'm writing for myself to figure out these thoughts that are in my mind. And by putting them out into the world it forces me to think more critically about topics than what I would haphazardly jot down in a journal.
Not much new critical thinking in this post but I thought the pictures from Tokyo Tower were nice.
- S, 8月21日