-Facebook -YouTube -X -Threads -Instagram -"Fox News" -Reddit -Quora -Rednote

Over the last few years I have noticed a disturbing trend regarding breaking news or emergent events.  If I when I want to find out about such events I try to use standard commercially-available search engines such as Google or Bing (or DuckDuckGo or Ecosia, which like Bing, are owned by Microsoft) the top search results are usually links to posts on social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram or Reddit or similar platforms.  Links to articles written by actual professional journalists who follow long-standing codes of journalistic ethics (including fact-checking) are becoming increasingly hard to find.  

Let me just say straight up: posts on social media platforms are not journalism.  Therefore I do not trust these when they offer "breaking news" flashes.  From the Russian aggression against Ukraine to the current mess in the Mideast, I therefore do NOT consult anything found on YouTube, Quora, Rednote, Facebook, or the like.  The fact that posts on these platforms have been displacing genuine journalism can be attributed to multiple causes, such as the corporatization and monopolization of historically independent news outlets, the diversion of advertising revenue from historically independent news outlets to the owners of massively deployed social media platforms, and the massive gaming of the system of page and website rankings on the largest search platforms.  However, one particular cause is the fact that the providers of responsible journalism have increasingly hidden their content behind paywalls.  This in turn is probably an effect of the diversion of advertising revenue from actual news outlets to the owners of social media platforms.

So I'd like to set forth my strategy for coping with this proliferation of hot air and word salad on social media served up by search engines instead of actual journalism.  Whenever I try to find out more details about an emerging story of interest, I use one of the features of advanced search that was originally deployed on Google.  If, for instance, I hear a report or rumor that a dozen giant heads of lettuce grew legs and walked through a town in the Midwest, killing dozens of people, I type in the search box of my search engine of choice something like '"giant heads of lettuce" walking' and see what search results come up.  If the first two or three pages of search results are dominated by links with titles like "Facebook: You've Got to See This! - Giant Heads of Lettuce On the Rampage!" or, "YouTube: Midwest Town Threatened By Lettuce!" then I modify my search query as follows.  I type into the search box '"giant heads of lettuce" walking -Youtube -Facebook -Reddit -Instagram -Threads -X -Quora -"Fox News" -Tiktok' and run a new search query.  The way this works is that whatever I type in quotes such as "giant heads of lettuce" returns search results that contain that quoted phrase verbatim.  On the other hand, whatever keywords have a short dash (-) in front of them are excluded from the search.  This means that any search results offered by a platform that has a dash in front of it are excluded from my search results.

This method works tolerably well for general searches, although it breaks down seriously when I try to search for pictures.  For instance, if I click on the "Images" tab of my search page and type -"baboon brushing teeth" "wikimedia commons"' in the search box, I will definitely get all kinds of images that are NOT hosted by Wikimedia Commons!  If, moreover, I try to use the dash prefix to exclude those images that are not hosted by Wikimedia Commons, they will show up anyway.  So maybe my prefix dash method is not so foolproof after all.  If search providers ruin general search in the same way that they have ruined image search, then my prefix dash method of filtering search results will break down.  But never fear - I still have other methods up my sleeve.

On Fleeing The Glowing Glass

I have every intention of continuing my series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  However, as I have said in a recent post, I've been working like a dog.  This has deprived me of bandwidth needed to write research-heavy posts.  In a few weeks, hopefully, I won't be so busy.  

This week, I thought it would be good to re-visit a post I wrote a few months ago titled, "Farewell to YouTube."  I wrote that post to announce my decision to quit watching YouTube videos.  I made the decision to quit because YouTube had chosen to make itself the haunt of racist, far-Right thugs (and of extremists in general).  (See this also.)  The reason for YouTube's decision was that the executives who run this service were told by marketers and cognitive psychologists that the way to drive up viewership was to recommend and promote videos that provoke outrage and extremism.  The reason why these doofuses thought that this was a good idea was that increased viewership meant increased advertising revenue for YouTube (and hence for Google).  I just got nauseatingly tired of recommendations to videos by Sky News, Fox News, or any other media outlet owned by the family of Rupert Murdoch.  I got "projectile emesis" tired of seeing recommendations for any videos with Donald Chump as the main character - especially after the attempted takeover of the U.S. Capitol by Trump-head white supremacists in January and after YouTube's foot-dragging in removing former President Chump's access to YouTube.  

So I quit YouTube this past January.  But a funny thing happened.  I discovered that I was experiencing withdrawal symptoms of a sort.  Not that I missed being constantly insulted and threatened.  But it was because of my original reasons for starting to watch YouTube in the first place - reasons which roughly paralleled my original fascination with the Internet in the first place.  For the Internet (and YouTube in particular) started out as a source of inspiration and information to guide me in my pursuit of the mastery of hard things.  Later, they became an unfortunate escape to an unfortunate extent, as I found myself stuck in the drudgery of everyday life while compensating for the drudgery by sneaking looks at people whose lives truly seemed to be a happy adventure. This was especially true of the fascination I developed for the Philippines, for Indonesia, for South Korea, and for Gambia last year.  For in watching YouTube videos of life (and music) in these places, I was struck by the difference between the happy, sane cultures and the polite, pleasant people I was seeing versus the derangement of life in the United States under Donald Thump.

In quitting YouTube, I found that I was missing the dopamine rush of vicarious living - that is, of living through the experience of watching other people's happiness.  So I fell off the wagon a bit in February.  I thought I could tame the YouTube beast by switching browsers and search engines.  And I discovered YouTube channels hosted by people who made videos of themselves studying.  This was during our rainy winter season, and I had not yet been vaccinated, so I was stuck working from home.  The study videos did indeed provide inspiration, but I noticed that some of them also seemed to be designed to sell furniture, music players, computer monitors, and other gear so that the viewer could replicate the perfect study setup he or she was watching on his or her glowing screen.  As I watched these videos while doing some difficult reading of my own, I was struck by the silly banality of thinking I needed to watch a video of someone else studying in order to help me do my own work.  

And I was again confronted by the fact that for too many people (myself included), YouTube had become a means of vicarious enjoyment of other people' successes rather that a help for us in doing our own difficult yet worthwhile tasks.  It is much easier to watch mentally healthy, non-radicalized, non-European people socializing in developing countries than it is to try to repair the poisoned culture of one's own country.  It is much easier to watch an accomplished fingerstyle guitarist play music than it is to pull one's own ax out of the closet and engage in an hour of deliberate practice.  It is much easier to watch someone study to the sound of background music in the perfectly decked out living room of a fifth or sixth floor condominium whose window looks out over a city skyline than it is to read technical journals in silence at a desk in a spare bedroom during a rainstorm.  (Although now the weather is quite warm and dry.  My backyard has become the perfect place for me to do some deep work, accompanied by the ASMR sound of the freeway several blocks away and the more intermittent sound of the wind in the trees. My backyard beats the condo dude's living room - even though he has thousands of YouTube "followers"!  Maybe I should make videos of myself reading in my backyard.  Or maybe not...)  

So I am back on the wagon.  And one thing that has helped me stay on this time is a podcast I heard in March or April, titled, "Close Enough: The Lure of Living Through Others."  Fascinating stuff.  What are we missing by living vicariously through social media rather than doing the hard work needed to accomplish worthwhile things ourselves?  What kind of miserable life do you have if you spend all your time on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube?  And even if YouTube should clean up its act and cease to be a tool of white radicalism, would it be worth it for me to go back?  Didn't I waste enough time as a kid watching hours of TV?  What if by boycotting a thing, you discover that you really don't need it anymore?