While there remains a lot of uncertainty and questions in the wake of the 2024 elections, one thing that seems clear to me is about myself: I’m more terminally online than I realized, and I don’t love that. As I’ve written before, the urge for up-to-the-moment news doesn’t actually make me a more informed person but only works to drive emotions that aren’t particularly healthy. Plus, I feel as though I really misjudged this election. I’m a historian, not someone who predicts the future; but I really feel as though social media skewed the way I was thinking about things.
Oliver Burkeman (that I learned of by way of Alan Jacobs) a couple of years ago referred to the idea of being news-resilient: how to be properly informed without the doomerism and time-sinks that comes along with social media.
I’ve been considering this for a couple of days now, and here is where I’ve settled:
- Much stricter time around Bluesky. I already had an app limit in place on my Apple devices, but this is getting even tighter. I’m not quite ready to give it up because some of my friends are there, and I want to keep up with their thinking. (I realized lately I scroll Bluesky like I once scrolled Twitter, and while I think it’s considerably less toxic on Bluesky–even before Musk’s acquisition–it’s not particularly useful to do be there all the time.)
- I’m keeping several newsletters around, some of which revolve around the news of the week. Ideally, I’ll be adding as many of these as I can to my RSS reader rather than email.
- I’m a long-time user of NetNewsWire for RSS feeds; I’m making the app more prominent for when I’d like to read. I’ll be revisiting the feeds I have, and adding new ones.
- Continue my subscription to The Atlantic. Start a new subscription for The Economist; my daily news check will be The Economist’s The World in Brief. I cancelled both my New York Times and Washington Post subscriptions long ago. I’ll keep Apple News around, too.
- I’m both a historian of and resident of the American West, and I can think of no better place for keeping up with this region than High Country News. I’ll be continuing my existing subscription.
- One or two politics-specific podcasts I’ll use to keep up with things–but most of my podcasts are primarily for history consumption.
And, for now, that’s it.
