Social Media Quick(ie) Takes Don’t Do It For Me

Politics online? Not very sexy.

All weekend I’ve been casually surfing Twitter like I normally do, for brain candy in between those hours of toddler interaction. Only I haven’t found any. Very few, anyway. The stuff coming out commemorating 100 years since Bolshevism makes for a valuable read. As for the rest of it, the endless diatribes on thoughts, prayers, and gun control, well I’m done adding my voice to the choir on those topics. Monday morning brought more of the same. I logged on to see a bunch of stuff about Trump and koi ponds. Snooze fest. Let’s move on, shall we?

We shall. Or, at least I will. This is a major thing for me, given the fact that I started blogging and eventually became a paid blogger because of my political interests. But, the thing is, the further I got into my work, the more I began to realize that I didn’t care as much about politics as I did about culture. Specifically, I was interested in how political beliefs influenced culture and how easily a political viewpoint can warp culture at large.

The late Andrew Breitbart was fond of saying “politics is downstream of culture.” He was right. A college professor I knew, who was also an avowed communist, believed that politics was culture. These past years, as I hung around in the political scene, despite it being the conservative one, I came to realize that anyone who immersed themselves in politics was bound to take the communist point of view regarding culture sooner or later. It’s like mission creep.

Maybe it was becoming a mother, maybe it was the advent of Trump, or maybe it was just because I had stayed at the party (without ever being “in” the Party) too long; either way I began to realize how boring that perspective truly is. How many times a day do I read something political and just think, “Get a life!” Or simply, “How boring?” Too many.

That isn’t to say there aren’t people out there making great, essential points. The thing is that most of them are making those points by focusing on the things that wind up largely being ignored because of … politics. Local news. Issues impacting families. New discoveries in science. What’s going on in education. How religion is impacting faith and what faith is doing to organized religion. These are building-block subjects that act as the foundation of our culture. But because they tend to be detailed, nuanced discussions that don’t translate into easily digested clickbait they are ignored first by the aggregators and then, ashamedly so, by us.

Blah blah, koi ponds. Blah blah, gun control. Blah blah, Weinstein. Want to put my theory to the test? Create a Twitter list of 10 of the top “news” sites and political commentators you read. Scroll through one 24-hour period and you’re likely to run into the same Tweet of the same headline a minimum of 4 times. One of those times someone might have re-hashed the descriptor a bit, maybe updated a photo, but that’s about it.

If the story is REALLY popular you’ll see updates, too. That cuts a 24-hour news cycle down to 6 hours, even less for updates, which is about how much time you’ll spend looking at your phone over the course of the average day. Do it on a weekend and the top titles of the week will appear over and over and over again. You’ll beg for Monday just to see something new appear in your feed.

Sexual Frustration’s Got Nothing on News Frustration

We’re on overload because social media sites run everything according to “trend,” not timeline. We miss out on 95% of what we should be paying attention to because we’re being fed “trends” by news sites and commentators who need to constantly comment on what’s trending so they can remain trending at the top of their followers’ feeds. Suddenly everyone’s talking about what’s trending, but very few are saying anything truly valuable.

I just can’t manifest the energy to care anymore about this ongoing cycle of bull. It sounds so nihilistic, so ‘90s, so Gen-X/Kurt Cobain/Simpsons, I know.

So let me refine it a bit: Perhaps it isn’t that I don’t care, but rather I’d like to know what, exactly, you want me to do beyond click, favorite and repeat? And if that’s all you think I’m good for, I think this relationship has hit a real dead-end, don’t you?

It’s like staying together for the quickies. Hot takes play like hot sex: Easy intrigue, hints of scintillation, rapid release and three days of wondering whether or not it should have lasted a whole. Lot. Longer. Maybe that’s why the most satisfied news consumers were the ones “married” to the network anchor of their choice in the 1950’s. We’ve forgotten how hot commitment can be in the newsroom.

So, like every other disillusioned lover I’m burned out and ready to move on. That’s dangerous for you, web news media. Demographically speaking I’m your target market: Mother with smartphone looking to click away minutes here and there throughout her busy, if intellectually unstimulating day. I’m the woman your advertisers want to sell to. I’m the clicks you want to get. And here I am, so bloody bored out of my mind by your witless garbage that I’m ready to plumb the depths of Dickens, hell, Chaucer just to find fulfillment.

Perhaps I’ll start a new project: Shakespeare, one line at a time, in between errands. Better yet, I’ll get the errands done, occupy the boy with toys and pursue some online intellectual toys of my own without the help of Ms. Aggregator Matchmaker. Shock! I dare to think — and read for myself!