Tonight, as I sit watching election results roll in, I am feeling an unfamiliar feeling: hope. I don’t think everything is going to change for the better, and I know that we still have a lot of problems in this country, but I see that there is a way for everyday Americans to use their voices to keep this republic.
And that brings me back to Twitter. I used to get almost all my breaking news from Twitter. But in recent days, I’ve been trying to find new ways to get the same instant updates for both stories I wanted to follow, but also push notifications about events that were happening all over the world. This week, though, it’s pretty obvious that even if I wanted to use The Bird App like I used to, it’s no longer up for the task.
In past elections, I would typically get push notifications from news apps and Twitter within moments (pun intended) of each other. Tonight, I didn’t get any from Twitter. And that made me so, so sad. The reasons for this are obvious, and it reinforces the mourning I’ve been going through for the loss of the service I’ve come to rely so heavily on for my day-to-day news consumption.
Rethinking how I get my news — and whether or not there’s really a need to find out about events the minute they happen rather than a few hours later — will be a journey that I’m reluctantly going to have to start. Maybe I’ve already taken some tentative steps tonight; I ended up watching TV!
My news consumption hierarchy tended to be Twitter, podcasts, news apps, public radio, and occasionally TV. Without Twitter in that top spot, I’m worried that I’ll be less informed. But even as I type that, I can rationalize that as most likely untrue. I won’t be less informed, I just won’t be as quickly informed. But first hasn’t always been factual. Maybe I actually need some distance between the instance a breaking alert hits my phone and the time it takes for trained journalists to create stories which will put that alert into proper context before I form an opinion about it.
Could the loss of Twitter actually make me better informed? Maybe. I’m reminded of a post I wrote years ago about how the Boston Marathon bombings played out in Tweets. Context that day would have been greatly appreciated. That probably holds true every day.
I’m starting to like these posts as forcing functions to question some of the assumptions I had before I started putting them into words. Thanks for, once again, letting me think out loud.
Searching with My Good Eye Closed
08 November 2022
Stuck on elections.
Tonight, as I sit watching election results roll in, I am feeling an unfamiliar feeling: hope. I don’t think everything is going to change for the better, and I know that we still have a lot of problems in this country, but I see that there is a way for everyday Americans to use their voices to keep this republic.
And that brings me back to Twitter. I used to get almost all my breaking news from Twitter. But in recent days, I’ve been trying to find new ways to get the same instant updates for both stories I wanted to follow, but also push notifications about events that were happening all over the world. This week, though, it’s pretty obvious that even if I wanted to use The Bird App like I used to, it’s no longer up for the task.
In past elections, I would typically get push notifications from news apps and Twitter within moments (pun intended) of each other. Tonight, I didn’t get any from Twitter. And that made me so, so sad. The reasons for this are obvious, and it reinforces the mourning I’ve been going through for the loss of the service I’ve come to rely so heavily on for my day-to-day news consumption.
Rethinking how I get my news — and whether or not there’s really a need to find out about events the minute they happen rather than a few hours later — will be a journey that I’m reluctantly going to have to start. Maybe I’ve already taken some tentative steps tonight; I ended up watching TV!
My news consumption hierarchy tended to be Twitter, podcasts, news apps, public radio, and occasionally TV. Without Twitter in that top spot, I’m worried that I’ll be less informed. But even as I type that, I can rationalize that as most likely untrue. I won’t be less informed, I just won’t be as quickly informed. But first hasn’t always been factual. Maybe I actually need some distance between the instance a breaking alert hits my phone and the time it takes for trained journalists to create stories which will put that alert into proper context before I form an opinion about it.
Could the loss of Twitter actually make me better informed? Maybe. I’m reminded of a post I wrote years ago about how the Boston Marathon bombings played out in Tweets. Context that day would have been greatly appreciated. That probably holds true every day.
I’m starting to like these posts as forcing functions to question some of the assumptions I had before I started putting them into words. Thanks for, once again, letting me think out loud.
See you tomorrow?