I am not sure how this will go and it could be this is futzing under another guise, but this evening I did improve on my futz pattern a little by choosing to devote a journal entry to some thinking I’ve been doing about The News, how to consume it, how much to consume, etc. etc. IOW, instead of diddling around with a tool or a toy, I started writing about something that matters to me.
Ordinarily, writing like that either gets punted into a blog post pretty quickly or gets a few sentences then peters off. Worse, it sometimes becomes a blog draft that I kill because it’s not a viable blog post for whatever reason, but now it’s too other-oriented to be a good journal entry any longer.
Tonight I started drifting in that direction – the blog post that would not come to a good end– and I didn’t like that. But there’s more to think about because when I look at my behavior toward news media in the past several months something has definitely changed very profoundly, and while we can all guess why I’m not sure how to feel about that yet.
Last time around, post-2016, I picked up a lot of baggage about media consumption, what I made of other peoples’ apparent patterns, what I thought that was doing to them, where I thought it was coming from, and what I thought of all the rationales people deploy to justify their choices.
This time around, I can feel some of those thoughts rolling around inside, but I feel a little more detached from them, it feels a little less personal, things that seemed very urgent seem less so, and some stuff just can’t be allowed to matter. It turns out someone is still wrong on the internet.
But I don’t want to write an essay about all of it. I’ve never liked outlines much. So I decided to experiment with atomic notes on this topic, just committing little nuggets and chaining them off of each other, but when I could tell I was headed out of the narrow confines of one atom – say, “what’s good about the news?” – and into another atom – “how much news is enough to get the good parts?” – I made a new atom and picked up there.
It helped me in one way that didn’t occur to me going in, which is that it’s much easier to resist having a narrative of some kind, or an urge toward a conclusion. When I asked “what’s good about the news?” and wrote about that, and then thought, “probably a good idea to make a sibling to ask what’s bad about it,” that got its own node and I didn’t have both sets of things sitting there right next to each other jostling for head of the line, or demanding I steer toward the conclusion.
Because I don’t have a conclusion. All I know is that something has definitely changed in my thinking and behavior around a core part of most college-educated peoples’ ideas about how they’re supposed to behave in the world, and I’d like to think it through without having a conclusion in mind. So we’ll keep at this for now.
Oh, right, what’s the toy: Denote and denote-sequence. Of all the note frameworks, etc. that I’ve played around with, my org-based Denote notes are still the most legible, useful, and navigable. Still getting the hang of how to wrangle a sequence, but not so much that I’ve had to stop writing and screw around with it to the point of a derail.