The Cleanse

I’m in the midst of a media cleanse. This started before the election when I canceled my Washington Post subscription. Jeff Bezos can do whatever he wants with the Washington Post, and he’s 100% correct that I don’t trust large media organizations.

After the election, I removed all news sources from Feedly except the Atlantic because I find their writing informative and compelling.

A friend calls this turtling. Pulling your head inside your shell and hiding. It’s quite comfortable here. With most of my free time, I’m leveling a dragon Holy Priest in World of Warcraft. #ama

Next on the list is Twitter. Since it was sold and turned private, my engagement has been significantly lower, and my follower count has shrunk as the humans have moved off the platform, but quite soon, I’m deleting my account. My finger has been over the DELETE button for a few days, and I’ve wondered why. Two facts: First, there are thousands of folks with whom I share stuff there. I can see they are there via much reduced but real engagement. Second, I have just under 20k tweets since 2007 that, upon review, tell an interesting story… at least to me.

I’ve downloaded the complete archive, and I’m sad to say I’m about to create a bunch of 404 errors when my corpus of tweets vanishes from Twitter. Why? This is my content, and I don’t want whatever Twitter has become to benefit from its existence. I’ll share the archive here at some point, but for now, I’m cleansing.

Like FaceBook before it, Twitter turned into something else. They both, early on, felt like a means of connection. Unfortunately, building that social graph allowed these businesses to target you and your engaging, clickable content expertly. What was a means of connection turned into hot, juicy, bite-sized content. Over the past two decades, this practice has made us intellectually lazy because these media services are paid not on the quality but the quantity of service. More clicks, more engagement. Truth and facts. Optional.

And what was a clever means of connection turned into a raging stream of clickable things.

So, bye, Twitter. I’m late to the funeral, but better late than never. It was fun before it got terrifying.

While I am profoundly turtling and have little desire to see a path forward, I have two related observations:

First, the lack of healthy debate on most social media is one of the core issues with the platform. Humans must disagree, but these platforms do not provide a proper bi-directional medium (or set of tools) for these debates. It’s liking, then not liking, then yelling, then ALL CAPS, and NOW I’M UNFOLLOWING YOU and YES BLOCKING BYE.

Debate is a tricky act between two humans who can both speak, listen, understand, and possibly evolve. Two humans. Often, there will be more, but let’s keep it simple and assume it’s two. Both humans are required to do this, and in the primarily anonymous world of social media, it’s normal not to consider the other human a human. They are the last thing they wrote that you disagree with. There is no relationship; it’s simply the last thing they posted. And how do you feel about that post.

The stakes are higher in person. You have to stare at that human in the eye, especially after they say something you don’t like. So, what do you do? You can’t yell, you can’t ignore them, and you certainly can’t block them, so what is your move? Mine: seek understanding. Put on that empathy hat and try to understand why they’re saying what they’re saying. That’s the first step. There are many more — read the book.

The continual failure to do this in social media results in a growing echo chamber where the humans agree, and those who disagree are quickly voted off the island. Some of these echo chambers are low stakes. Think about your favorite sports team. Those fans are aligned on what’s important. Who needs debate? The only debate we care about is what $OTHER-TEAM we hate the most. Go $OUR-TEAM.

There are higher-stakes echo chambers, too. Use your imagination here.

Second, it’s not a short or medium-turn fix to what ails us, but I am curious about investing in local and independent news organizations. Large media organizations have to compete with social. They desperately need those clicks, and that means mimicking the patterns they see in social. The headline must engage in one second or less, or it will be forgotten. It’s an economy of attention, not understanding or truth.

Local media has taken it on the chin for decades because social media consumes advertising dollars. Local media has withered without that support, with remaining big media sources bending to social media engagement patterns. The idea of investing in local media news organizations is because they report on the events that happen in my neighborhood. This makes them more human to me. They have skin in the game because, like me, they live here. My problems are their problems, which means we have a solid foundation to start to understand.

How do I go about this investment? Where do I start?

I don’t know. I’m turtling. For now.