I am now approximately two weeks into my great social media experiment and my "avoiding the news" experiment and thought I would offer a little feedback on how things are going.
I am tracking this by means of a spreadsheet. Ever day, I rate if checked social media, aggregator sites, and general "news and opinion" sites. I try to be kind with myself in that if I check something once a week, that does not count against the total. There may also be occasions I want to post - like, for example, my parents' birthday. I have worked to find sources that discuss economic news, as that remains one that I am very much interested in and tracking.
I will note that I chose the word "bubble" intentionally. This effective media "blackout" combined with the ongoing Plague does really make one feel as if one is a defined bubble of existence.
News:
The first note I have is that, especially when working remotely, is that it is pretty easy to avoid news if you do not want to see it. If I am not commuting, there is no need to listen to the radio. We have no cable, so television is easy enough to avoid. And the InterWeb - well, if you do not click, you do not go to the sites.
The second note is that my life is that much more stress free. I am not having internal arguments with myself over people's opinion pieces or choices governments are making about policies - which, of course, I have zero chance of impacting any way. I am, overall, much less annoyed during the day.
The third note is that I do need to increase my exposure to economic news - reliable economic news, not just the "happy news". Currently I track wolfstreet.com and dailyjobcuts.com. Happily looking for recommendations of unbiased economic reporting with a minimum of political news.
Social Media
The first note, again, is that it is pretty easy to fall out of the habit of checking social media multiple times a day. It becomes easier (perhaps not oddly enough) when you do not post anything and thus, you are not constantly nagged by your mind to "check" on how it is doing.
The amount of feed in The Book of Face and the relative non-reaction to two weeks of posting suggests that for most folks, I just blend in to the overall background noise of their social media experience and thus an interruption in news from me is nothing that seems that remarkable. In other words, it really just confirms the fact that my importance, at least in my own mind, is vastly over-rated.
I will say that what I miss is not so much the individual updates but the updates to groups that I belong to - more for interest factoids than for anything else.
Is there a reduced place for social media in my future? I am not sure. Certainly to this point there has really been nothing ill that has come from not "checking in" every day. I am willing to let the experiment continue to run and see how I feel.
What have I replaced this time with? Reading. Bits and pieces of other projects, working to string together those bits and pieces into a more coherent whole.
Overall, this has been a wonderful experience. I am now wondering why I did not do it sooner.
I'm glad to hear 'unplugging from information chaos' is working so well. My wife refuses to hear 'talk radio' in the car while driving, so to keep the peace in family, we agree to hear music instead. Satellite radio which has very few advertisements and news blurbs is usually on.
ReplyDeleteInformation overload does cause a lot of stress. As you said, not a thing can be done from our side which causes the aggravation. What I do worry about is keeping up with the general feel - one event can cause a lot of change when it comes to politics. I wish I had more confidence with the new regime. Maybe more time is needed.
Anonymous - That is always a concern, the fact that something significant which causes a great deal of change in any direction that I will be unaware of until long after it happens. To some extent by taking this path, I have consigned myself to accepting that risk and those outcomes. And I am quite certain there are folks who would state that by doing so, I am part of the problem. I think my response, in that case, would simply be I can influence nothing anyway. It also does give one a certain freedom of opinion to view things after the fact and, having a clean and unbiased slate, to evaluate them more effectively.
DeleteNice work! You could also create a Facebook account and join the groups you miss. Those things to me are where social media does it right. Just a thought. Make it a tool! If you have not watched ' the social delemma' you should check it out..sort of fluff but some interesting Insider insight on social media and how and why it is doing things. Just a thought!
ReplyDeleteEGB - That is certainly another thought (and one I had not considered). Another option, truly, is to mute everyone but those groups.
DeleteI will keep the show in mind - the Podcast from The Art of Manliness I listened to was very interesting in that regard.
..not to mention I feel bad for news agencies. We expect news all the time and have 24x7 coverage..I don't blame news agencies for cramming bad news at us constantly. I have some trusted sources for relevant news and listen locally..but it all makes bad news seem like it never stops. To me it turns people off. Too much churn on almost everything..multiply that by all of the news agencies and you have a recipe for a newer ending onslaught of bad news. I am not saying I stick my head in the sand..only that I don't think we need it all the time. Just a thought..again. I feel I had to post twice in here as I made it to a recent post for a change and am not 2 months behind!
ReplyDeleteOnce you realize that the vast majority of mainstream and social media is geared toward annoying the living hell out of you, you are well on the road to freedom TB. Those things are tools, not toys. Given the days ahead, I approach those things like social media, internet and cell phone tools as mere conveniences. If/when things go south and these things start working against men like us rather than for us... I want to be able to take the sledge hammer to them and dispense with them altogether with no bones about it.
ReplyDeleteIt is sobering to realize how little you matter when you hit a certain age. But it is liberating too, once you get your head around it. There is the notion these days that we must always be around others, we must always accommodate them, never offend them, never be lonely and that we must include them in everything we do. I’m sorry, but I am not built that way psychologically. I need elbow room and airspace, and the world is so crowded and stuffy now... it makes sense to be somewhere else with most folks today. You may not matter any more... but neither do they.
I have been busy, and tired, and lazy. I haven't posted as I want on my blog, but I have a regimen of checking in on those I care about.
ReplyDeleteI admire your organizational skills. I had some training to do in project management, and, wow, that was eye opening. I wonder if someone as ignorant as I am, could learn to do that? It was an eye opening experience.
For some reason, I find it very easy when on vacation to simply remove myself from all things internet or news reporting. I don't miss it in the slightest which I guess is why I generally enjoy my vacations. But once home, I tune into the evening national news cast religiously. I do get flash updates on my phone to stay current to breaking stories but I rarely click them to expand them beyond the one sentence I've already seen in the flash.
ReplyDeleteI find the BBC app to be pretty good. You can customize it to your news by selecting what particular segment you want to follow and the order it presents itself. The only drawback is that when you open the app, you get the main page with all the political drama and have to click the "my news" tab to get to the stuff you want to read about. They are also fairly liberal in what they consider to be news related to a specific category at times, but it is much better than wading through pages of stuff I don't want to see just to find those few gems. I did just look and they have a U.S. Economy filter that you can select for your news page.
I am an infrequent contributor to the Book of Face mostly because I never share or put on content that isn't original. But once in a blue moon when I do, I am usually amazed at the people who "like" what I posted. I get the sense that people are starving for original content when 95% of the Book of Face is just stuff that gets shared or copied. Along that thread, when I have added a friend and I do consider them a true friend but they never add original content, I unfollow them but remain their friend. This helps to minimize the bulk of crap that gets posted in my feed. If they are just an acquaintance, I generally "snooze" them for 30 days and when their content annoys me again, just quietly unfriend them. That keeps things weeded down a bit. Other than a cousin and a grandma, I don't have family on the platform so I mostly just use it to stay in touch with the activities of some local organizations and see what a few in town friends I do have going on in their lives.