I must be getting old. I don't feel the urge or need to read about all the junk, white noise on social media. Sadly I increasingly find the stories and reports on main media (that use to be reliably good in the past) rather subpar. Perhaps it's the new crops of reporters who come of age from 150-word tweets, perhaps it's robo-reportings by algorithms (that a lot of news source seem to be employing these days). The end result is, news headlines - if you can call it "news" - of even main media are mostly clickbaits. I get so tired of reading about "Read This On Five Things You Don't Know About Social Security," or "Three Ways To Reduce Your Taxes," etc etc, all of which are simply a rewrite of some well-known tidbits of facts and old news that literally everyone should know about. Then again, maybe these clickbaits are not targeting me, per se, but the much younger folks who don't know about these things that they should have learnt long time ago. (I'm quite tempted to use the word ignorance, but I feel charitable today.)
Regardless, I've mastered the trick of discerning non-news and junks like these. This is a useful survival skills, given the increasing volume of horseshits floating around on the web. Younger people might feel the need to read everything, partake in every forum, but nay, the trick, mi amigo, is to discern the repetition and ignore them all.
I do have to say, one has to get to a certain age, and be self-assured enough to know one's place in this universe, that one doesn't need to seek approval from total strangers on the web (which oft turn into vitriol in a heartbeat). Thankfully my life and livelihood don't evolve and rely on being "famous." (I value my privacy, of all things.) There is a genuine need to stay connected and learn new things even as we age, but discerning/ignoring the junk is an absolute must. Think of it this way: AI relies on Big Data to feed it absolutely everything (in an ever-increasing volume) in order to learn and discern patterns, but for us humans, our brain doesn't follow that pattern. Us humans use our brain power and the power of reduction. The important bits of inputs, is facts.
It is thus that I've relied more and more on main media's actual news reports on hard news. I've come to love Bloomberg News, coupled with cogent column reporting like Financial Times and Foreign Affairs. The actual data, plus the focused reporting, are what I want/need. I guess I have enough of my own opinions that I no longer need partisan columnists (from both the left and the right) to tell me what I should think or where I should stand. Occasionally there are great investigative reports from the likes of New York Times and Los Angeles Times, but the reporting and opinion pieces in the likes of Washington Post and Boston Globes have become so partisan and skewed that I have stopped subscribing to them altogether.
I subscribe to multiple news media, oftentimes just to show my continued support of their work. If news media are to find a target audience who is committed, well-funded, and willing to pay for their paywall, I would be their model customer.
The past two decades have been hard on news media. Faced with the onslaught of social media and news aggregator like Google News who pays peanuts to use their contents almost for free, main news media have joined the social media game, tweaking their news headline to become clickbaits. I can totally empathize with that plight. If there is one thing that anyone can learn from the likes of New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg News, it is that there are still news audience like myself who are willing to pay for quality reporting. I don't need to read a non-news story that was sourced from a tweet with 12 likes, these are just junks to me. I don't need to keep reading the same shit over and over and over again, sometimes even shamelessly plagiarized, copy-and-paste from another source without citation. (I read multiple newspapers on daily basis, so it's easy to discern outright plagiarism like this.) Perhaps some woke reporters are really passionate about low-income plight, but their editors should be smart enough to provide a more balanced view from other reports to show how expanding social welfare will do to the country's budget over the long term. When a government employs a staff, it isn't just the salary to pay, there are benefits to cover, there are pensions to pay well into retirement, and these are expenditure commitments that are decades in the making. How would that affect a government's long term finance??? No one cares about the long term (certainly not AOC or Bernie Sanders). And when someone like Joe Manchin who does ask the right question, he is vilified as evil baddie. Readers are more intelligent than that kind of simplistic black-and-white binary portrait of reality. Responsible news media would seek to inform and educate readers if they don't see nuance, leaving the readers to make their own decision, rather than having the reporter spoon-fed them with a foregone conclusion. THIS is something that I see missing in our increasingly polarized world. I, for one, refuse to participate in this polarization.
Recently I'm finding time to reread classic books (not just novels, old texts, but ancient scripts and poetry), some of which I read ages ago. I have not realized that the writing has morphed so much that I would not be surprised if younger generations (from the likes of the woke crowds to the likes of Proud Boys who probably never read a damn book from start to finish in their lives) don't find interests or even understand how to discern the meaning behind the words. It's easy for anyone to be opinionated, but it's hard work to have an opinion that's debatable and supportable with balanced facts (not just a one-sided view).
In case anyone is interested: It turns out, Amazon has tons of old books, poetry, even ancient texts that are available for Kindle download, for free (!). It's such a wealth to build a personal library which I'm doing right now. While it's not the same as having a physical book in hand, reading on a device has its perks (including easily configurable font size that can be easier on the eyes). This is an oasis to me when I'm alone at home, cooped up with a hot chocolate in hand, it's so much fun to read and far more enjoyable than to troll on social media to get one's blood pressure amped up. Trust me, social media isn't worth pushing your blood pressure to stay elevated.
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