A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
We have immersed ourselves to a few mega social media platforms. Angertainment is all the rage. If you think doom scrolling, keeping up with Jones’, and entrusting your engrossment to algos designed to keep you in a constant state of anxiety is the path, have at it. Come for the social isolation and stay for the subsequent depression.
-Tony Isola, from this post
This feels like one of those NYT articles that's mainly performing the service of tending to the readers' emotions. Let's all do panic together this morning. When I encounter that sort of thing, my natural instinct is to go somewhere else. If we're doing group emotion, I'm looking for the door.
1) "We are living through the first alt-war: a conflict in which the war fought online and the war fought in reality have diverged so completely that they might as well be happening on different planets. It’s not that people lack information, it’s more that they are constructing an entirely different alternate reality — one that confirms what they already believe."
If your favorite media outlet has you confused about what is going on in the Middle East, one idea would be to check in with the Institute for the Study of War blog. Until proven differently, it will be my go-to site.
Here’s the standard interpretation of this result: Social media is distracting, and if you’re distracted, it becomes harder to maintain control over your schedule. So, the more you use social media, the worse you become at time management.
But I’ve become interested in the reverse form of this argument: the better your planning system, the less time you’ll spend on engagement-based applications like social media.
-Cal Newport, as posted here
According to Illich, society fosters a consumerist mindset and diminishes the self in the process. The beauty of individualism is lost, like a field of spring flowers wilted to a dull grey. It becomes harder to find satisfaction and happiness in life,
That's why we should read books that preserve our sense of self. Not just buy books, but to read them and understand the world. Instead of blindly following what the media tells us, we should find our own happiness. When we're feeling lonely, we shouldn't head to a shop but visit a friend. When we crave stability, instead of dreaming of a perfect home, we should find perfection in a simple life within our means.
Be aware of our own anxieties, know how to prioritize ourselves, understand and manage our inner desires, and books will help us find our way forward,
The media is full of sensationalized stories and temptations. To fight against its influence, we need to build a 'story vending machine' for ourselves. Each time we need something to lift our spirits, we can pick a story and let it play in our hearts.
-Hwang Bo-Reum, Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books
............on the disingenuousness of "vibe reporting":
The goal of this type of article is to create a pre-ordained vibe, not to get to the bottom of what’s really happening.
Bad ideas refuse to die, misinformation is everywhere, and a very profitable industrial complex has arisen to spread outrageous, inflammatory ideas — their business model IS clickbait. The mainstream media may be problematic, but social media is oh so much worse.
-Barry Ritholtz, from here
Up to then there had been something of a gentleman’s agreement among those who might be called The Good Journalists of Washington that the Kennedy Administration was one of excellence, that it was for good things and against bad things, and that when it did lesser things it was only in self-defense, and in order that it might do other good things.
-David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest
There is an endless torrent of media advice. It is an overwhelming firehose of speculation and opinion. Most of it can be safely ignored. . . .
The bigger issue is not the bad advice, but rather, the outsourcing of your thinking to a third party. You need to do your own thinking.
-Barry Ritholtz, How Not to Invest
Is there “right-wing
misinformation”? Hell yes. It exists in every direction. But I grew up a
Democrat and don’t remember being afraid of it. At the time, we didn’t need
censorship because we figured we had the better argument.
Obviously, some of you lack
that same confidence. You took billions from taxpayers and blew it on programs
whose entire purpose was to tell them they’re wrong about things they can see
with their own eyes.
-Matt Taibbi, from here
The revolt of the public will not necessarily usher in an authoritarian age. It does not necessarily foster populism. It is not necessarily destructive of liberal democracy. The revolt of the public, as I envision the thing, is a technology-driven churning of new people and classes, a proliferation and confusion of message and noise, utopian hopes and nihilistic rage, globalization and disintegration, taking place in the unbearable personal proximity of the web and at a fatal distance from political power. Every structure of order is threatened—yes. Nihilism at the level of whole societies, in the style of ISIS, is a possible outcome. But no particular system is favored or disadvantaged—and nothing is ordained.
-Martin Gurri, as culled from here
As always, the censors claimed that they needed sweeping powers to make the world better, safer and more truthful. And as censors always do, they proved themselves unworthy of those powers, which they deployed not just against ideas that were false but against politically inconvenient truths. In the process, they demonstrated why no one, of any ideological stripe, should be trusted with that kind of authority.
-Megan McCardle, from here
Your most precious asset isn’t your financial portfolio; it’s your attention.
Media outlets are fighting tooth and nail to capture bandwidth by any means necessary. Their favorite tactic is to scare the hell out of you.
Truth isn’t the sum of many facts: It works the other way around. We erect frameworks of understanding which the facts must fit into or modify. A healthy society will debate the relationship between a given fact and its role in our understanding of the world. The catastrophic failure of the mediators means that we now debate the frameworks and their meanings among ourselves. In this rolling chaos, interpretations have turned tendentious and partial. Reality has splintered into a million pieces. That’s the post-truth condition. . . .
The 20th century’s illusion of narrative integrity is gone forever. We now stumble along in the dark, plagued by uncertainty—an accurate description, I note, of the human condition.
-Martin Gurri, from this essay
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