I started collecting roundups of five interesting stories primarily as a sort of journal entry for my efforts to revamp my media diet to cut down on trending news. Like most new year’s resolutions and attempts at daily (or even semi-occasional) blogging, I wasn’t able to keep to a regular schedule on the link roundup for more than a few weeks. But I am happy to report the underlying project is going well and that my media diet has changed significantly — for the better, I think.
What’s been most interesting about cutting down on social media (which for me is mainly Twitter) has been disentangling all of the different ways it had embedded itself in my life. It was my source of breaking news (now largely supplied by Nuzzel alerts), a messaging platform (via DMs, which I still receive, but as emails or SMS texts), and a publishing platform (which is why I started using WordPress again). For news, I am trying to rely more on reading publications directly via apps on my phone or Apple News if I want a fix of broad-based news, reading people’s various curated newsletters, and listening to radio programs like BBC World Service throughout the day. At my most luxurious, my most rewarding news experience is something from a media diet I had given up years ago: scanning RSS feeds on Feedly.
But in recent weeks, I feel like I’ve moved past the point of trying to substitute for things I was missing after cutting down on Twitter and the regrowth of something I had long missed: serendipity. As the slice of publications I read gets more random, somewhat unexpectedly, the more connections appear. Instead of that feeling that Twitter or Nuzzel is constricting my news purview down to whatever the handful of trending stories are at any given moment, a broader (even if typically haphazard) survey of the news has made the world seem much larger again.
So I am going to try a reformat of my five interesting stories selection for a while to emphasize the serendipitous connections and present them as thematic “bundles”: five stories I discovered some other way than a trending news algorithm, just as before, but selected because they somehow speak to each other. Sometimes that’ll be obvious, other times less so. And it will ensure I’ll continue to write these pretty irregularly. But I hope it also makes for a more enjoyable read for anyone who happens to be following along.