Everything else? Burn it to the ground. I’d much prefer to keep up with friends goings on via email. It’s personal. It’s advertisement free. It’s more or less secure. Facebook is a community newspaper of advertising. Maybe, within the thirty pages of community paper analogy, by page sixteen I see something interesting about someone I care to know about. But from pages one through fifteen, I’ve been flipping through suggested purchases, fictional news and pictures of dinner plates.
I’ve already almost completely ditched Instagram. Yes it’s still on my devices. But I go weeks… sometimes months… without looking at it. For me, Instagram died when they removed your ability to simply view the things you follow chronologically. I don’t need some algorithm deciding for me that I’d rather see someone’s selfie from three weeks ago before seeing what someone shared an hour ago.
Snapchat? Please. I don’t need to add bunny ears or a dog nose to my picture. Nor do I have any interest to see someone else do it to there’s
Twitter gets a bad name. And it amazes me that news organizations are quoting world leader’s tweets. But I find Twitter can become what you want it to be. If someone is posting too much about something that doesn’t interest you, unfollow them and it goes away. And if you search out and find interesting and smart people, your twitter feed becomes interesting and smart. Or if you suddenly see several people tweeting about the same thing, you get a good hint to go google what they’re talking about and you can find all kinds of stories about it.
That all said, I’m often tempted to subscribe and pay for my news. I’ve already done it with sports… subscribing to the Athletic. I get commercial free articles from people who know what they’re talking about. Now I think about doing it for news. Facebook can’t be trusted to give you an actual view of the real world. And news websites are usually bombarded with advertising.
Who knows, I may end up buying newspapers at this rate. The internet is the greatest invention of my time, and here I’m considering going back to newspapers. It’s a shame that the greatest invention of my time has been wasted on self indulgence and personal point of view spin.
I guess what it boils down to is I need to read more. It’s a strange world I live in from a reading point of view. I have many books currently sitting in my house, or on my iPad, all ready to read. I want to read each of them and am interested in what they’ll say. But I have very little reading time in my typical week. It’s largely the fault of shift work. My four days of working, there’s no time to read. I’m at work for twelve hours, in bed asleep… or trying to sleep… for another six to eight hours. That leaves me with four to six hours for driving to and from work, eating, and just relaxing. Then, for my four days off, I’m too foggy to read and retain anything on day one. And my focus is more about trying to get outside hiking or snowshoeing while also doing errands or work around the house during the other three days. Plus there’s the new curse of the memory foam mattress. Over the last several weeks, it’s not uncommon for me to be in bed either sleeping or being very lazy on the iPad for ten to twelve hours of my days off.
The answer will have to be scheduled reading days. Maybe my third day off will be a minimal TV day. Something like that, where I know I am not to go get distracted by other things. I’m also looking forward to taking some time off in February. It’ll be nothing time off. No work needing to get done around the house. No hopping a plane to someplace else. Just twelve days of battery resetting. Puzzles… snowshoeing… reading… all free to do for a while in the middle of winter. Who knows… maybe I’ll have newspapers to sift through then too.
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