{"id":5170,"date":"2018-01-01T17:35:52","date_gmt":"2018-01-01T22:35:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/?p=5170"},"modified":"2018-01-01T17:35:53","modified_gmt":"2018-01-01T22:35:53","slug":"a-new-media-diet-for-a-new-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/2018\/01\/01\/a-new-media-diet-for-a-new-year\/","title":{"rendered":"A new media diet for a new year"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the biggest changes for me over 2017 was my media diet. How I get my news has changed many times in my life but for the previous five years or so (especially since Google Reader R.I.P.) the main way I experienced news was on Twitter. But around September 2016 it was clear Twitter was bad for me: even before it became the all-Trump-all-the-time channel, I noticed it was mainly a space for people to be outraged and angry at things.<\/p>\n

After the election, my most important media survival technique was to avoid Twitter at any cost. I deleted the app, set up SMS notifications so that I knew when anyone mentioned or DM’ed me, and primarily got my news from the wonderful app Nuzzel<\/a>, which helpfully aggregates links while filtering out all the chatter.<\/p>\n

But heading into 2018, I want to take my Twitter avoidance even further. The larger problem is that the attention span of “trending news” rarely has room for more than one story at a time. At one point over the holiday break the top ten stories on my Nuzzel feed were a 30-minute interview Trump gave to the New York Times<\/em> and a bunch of hot takes about said interview. I want a wider swath of news. The world is a bigger place than what one man tweets.<\/p>\n

The first part of my 2018 media diet resolution is a little amorphous: avoid trending news generally but especially Twitter. I’m not exactly sure what that will entail. I’ll be relying less on Nuzzel. As for what will replace it, Apple News has shown some promise so far and after a while I’ve grown to appreciate the news headline cards Google’s iOS app shows me. I am going to try to read more of the magazines I still receive and rarely read because no technology has yet equaled the serendipity of print. I’m on the lookout for a good daily general news email newsletter. I’ll keep listening to BBC World Service when I’m puttering in the kitchen. I’m not sure exactly how I’ll get my news in 2018 but it’s going to be a lot less dependent on viral velocity.<\/p>\n

The second part of the resolution is where this little site comes in: one of the most useful things Twitter still does is give me a place to share a random idea. I’ve never been much of a blogger (well, there was the time I ran an anonymous political blog) and I don’t plan on trying now. This little site has served a number of purposes over the years, mostly as a backend scratch pad. Now it will be the place where if there’s something I feel like saying, I’ll say it. I’ll probably share most of these posts back to Twitter and Facebook, but the goal is to be less of a member of those ecosystems \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and really to serve the top goal: a whole lot less Twitter.<\/p>\n

We’ll see how it goes. Happy new year!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the biggest changes for me over 2017 was my media diet. How I get my news has changed many times in my life but for the previous five years or so (especially since Google Reader R.I.P.) the main way I experienced news was on Twitter. But around September 2016 it was clear Twitter … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “A new media diet for a new year”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2skW4-1lo","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5170\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}