💾 Archived View for juliette.zone › gemlog › the-news.gmi captured on 2024-08-24 at 23:51:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Posted 2024-05-31
Around a year ago, when Bill C-18 was approaching in Canada, I was frying my brain like an egg on social media. This wasn't anything new, I had long since burnt it to a crisp on the flame of pandemic news, climate crises, the far-right grabbing power throughout the world, etc. I was struggling to function at this point. Rote work was perfectly doable, but anything complex that required actual planning moved further and further out of my reach. I felt isolated. I was panicking imagining all of the ills that could befall me and those I cared about.
In short, I needed to log off.
This is a brief explanation of and reflection on how I logged off Twitter. Ultimately these are just my attempts at finding an individual remedy to deeper problems with news, media, and community in our society, so I have no idea if this will be remotely interesting or useful to anyone else.
In any case...
While I deleted my Facebook many years ago and never used Instagram or TikTok, I was a regular Twitter user from 2015 until last year. This was especially true during the pandemic where, isolated and afraid, I tried to find news and something resembling community online. Strange as it may sound, this was a mildly hopeful time for me. I was going to start grad school and naively hoped that the disruptions brought by the pandemic would lead to meaningful, lasting social change. I was also living alone far from most of my friends and family, and was not coping with that well.
Others have done a great job recapping how Twitter-turned-X became more of a dumpster fire than before. From my perspective, my feed steadily became less informative, and more an assortment of commentary on the same few events and issues with some people taking the opportunity to share their favorite hate speech, and others expressing their doomer convictions. I didn't feel as if I could look away, however, since this was still how I was keeping track of what was happening in the world. With things as volatile as they were, I genuinely felt scared that I would miss something important if I looked away. After a while of going along on this completely miserable ride, I decided I needed to find a better way to stay informed and meet my basic human need for social interaction. What I ultimately settled on was two actions:
1. Replace Twitter as my main social network with David Social and Mastodon.
2. Get most of my information through RSS news feeds with a focus on local news.
This part actually worked quite well. David Social is a social network built from scratch by my friend, David. I'm not sure how many people have a friend who built their own social media site to apply this, but I have to say that being on a small social media network with my IRL friends and their friends was comfortable. Actually, maybe the average gemini user does have a social media building friend.
As for Mastodon, that is a far bigger community of people, but I was already predominantly following tech-interested queer people from around the world, which more or less is my interests. I subscribed to more francophones in Quebec who followed the Twitter exodus in hopes of having more of a local connection and writing more in French, but this didn't really pan out and most of those people are no longer active on the Fediverse.
All told, this part was a big success for me. Even with things kind of just continuing to go to shit in a million different ways over the past year, I have never had a panic attack due to David Social or Mastodon, and that has happened from Twitter doomscrolling. I can't tell if the size of the network is more important than the role of the dreaded Algorithmâ„¢. At a certain point, my Twitter "Home" timeline just turned into a mix of pandemic anxiety, and trans/queer rights anxiety, and whatever other depressing political topic was in the news. I don't think that experience would have been "better" even if Twitter was as small as a David Social.
On the other hand, I still haven't really felt like I was part of a "community" from social media. I know people have genuinely made lifelong connections through the Internet, but this just isn't my experience. I also am not convinced that's an outcome of technology worth prioritizing.
Oh boy. I was already using RSS to a large degree to keep track of local news, largely from sources like Pivot and Metro Media, and right around the time I was consciously switching over to "RSS for the news", Metro went bankrupt. There went a ton of local reporting in Montreal. Journalism as a whole is in a sorry state, and that has not made this task easier.
Ultimately, I decided I wanted to focus on Quebec and Canadian news, regardless of quality and my own gripes with publishers. My rationale behind this was that if I'm going to spend a lot of time panicking about what I see happening in the world, I'd rather it be stuff that is likely to directly impact me and that I am in turn likely to be able to impact. I also still wanted to use more French and prioritized French-language outlets. As of the time of writing, I am subscribed to:
This part is hard to assess. I definitely feel more informed, but I really don't trust the first four sources all that much, and then the bottom two update so infrequently as to be near useless. As a result, I can't tell if I actually am informed or not. I seem to know what's going on more in local politics than my friends and coworkers, but that's not really a change.
As for any kind of local or international news and activism not showing up in these sources, I'm entirely out of the loop. I have no idea what is happening with scheduling local protests and I have no idea how I can actually get involved in things I care about. And I am horribly uninformed on the ongoing atrocities happening in Palestine, which is a bit of a mixed bag in my current thinking. I'm frustrated with myself for not actually knowing what's going on in probably the most important event of the past year, and feel like this may approach the point of turning into a personal failing. However, I don't think passively consuming horror after horror online and having that take up all my energy would be better, and that's what I would've done had I stayed on social media.
All of this just to say, I think that the RSS news feed approach is really only as useful as the reporting you can find published via RSS. You're not going to discover new feeds this way, and in my experience this falls apart when you get into the very local or very remote. It's probably still a major improvement for most people primarily being informed through social media.
I'm still an anxious person and I still am slow to feel capable of taking action in the world around me. Small changes in media habits did not change who I fundamentally am. However, I really don't feel like my brain is being fried anymore. I actually have the mental space to consider the world around me, pursue hobbies, and get some work done from time to time. That's pretty great.
There are also some pretty significant gaps that I've already covered. My news coverage has some very obvious gaps and no straightforward way to patch them. The social interactions I have online now feel more meaningful, but still aren't substantive to the degree I imagined they could or should be. I'm going to keep iterating on this over the coming months and try to find a good balance. Perhaps I'll post an update to this if I think there's a change worth writing about.
In the meantime, if you have thoughts to share on this, I'd love to hear from you on the Fediverse on my account below!