Social Media and the News

Editor's note: This was originally sent out in the newsletter on 1/13/18

One thing that I have been working on is being more purposeful with my time. One thing that I am still pretty bad at is going down random internet holes or scrolling stupid feeds on my phone. I think (and by think, I mean know for a fact since I monitor my screen time) my biggest problem in this realm is Twitter. I enjoy Twitter a lot for the most part, outside of the useless time suck nature of it all, but I check it far too often and am a completionist about it. I have worked on thinning out the people I follow to make this easier but I know the real solution is to cut it off, at least for a while. Now Twitter isn’t alone in this, while I mostly avoid Facebook, I do check Instagram and Reddit regularly too. Instagram I give a pass to because I can check it quickly once a day and I have seen enough to satisfy my curiosities with it. It helps that they went away from a chronological feed because even though I hate that they did that, it keeps me from trying to see everything that is posted there since I have no way of knowing if I did. Instagram still feels young and innocent, although the ads to post ratio does seem to keep moving up. Reddit is mostly just a problem that I have to wander into of my own free will. I can go a few days without checking it, but it does have some pretty deep holes to wander off into. Youtube can act this way sometimes too.Social media has mostly turned into an echo chamber, finding the things you want to see and yelling at those who disagree with us. It once seemed like it was such a great thing to reconnect with people you missed from all over the world. While I love seeing pictures of those people I don’t see as much, most peoples social lives are posted through skewed filters and choice perfect moments. Social media’s biggest issue though is that it is a place to react to whatever the latest news headlines are, which is a big issue.News lives in a sort of weird place in my head. I struggle with the fact that I feel it is part of my duty as a member of society to be well informed on the current state of things and the fact that most of it really doesn’t matter. The news has become mostly just clickbait at this point. I guess it always has been, but with the always-on mentality, it has just gone to a whole other level. This is made much worse by the fact that on social media most people only see the headline, which is made to create a response. If you stop and think about the biggest stories from last year, how many can you remember off the top of your head? How often do things that happen on the news or on the web really have a lasting impression of more than 15 minutes? Plus the biggest shockers need more time for the truth to come out and to digest it all. We don’t get all the facts, we just run with whatever the news alert headline is.I know I am not the first one to bring these problems up, I don’t have a real plan yet either. I did decide to try and take a break from Twitter for a while though. As of writing this, it has been about four days for me. This doesn’t seem like a lot but when you check something three or four times a day it makes an impact. I haven’t decided how long I am going to stay off of it. I am just trying to get some perspective, something I am sure we all could use.John Green had a video about sort of this topic recently, a good quick watch. Also, this post from Joel Spolsky is in the same vein as well.I also have a podcast recommendation for you all. Hurry Slowly (Overcast link) started up around the same time I started doing this, in some ways, it runs very parallel to the things I write about here and think about in general. If you want to dip your toe in, episode 11 is a great place to start. It is a shorter episode and kind of gives a recap of the first ten episodes. You can get a feel for the style and if any of the other topics strike your interest then you can listen to them all. It is all good stuff.