In the run-up to 2012 I've noticed two things in the struggle to reduce ingestion of monotonous analysis and insipid happy talk. First, I'm finding little on TV, even in comparison with three years ago. I'll get out the low-glycemic junk food and watch TV during election returns, that's pretty much it.
Second, a bigger change is that this time around my "P-Tix" bookmarks folder only has five links in it, three of them holdovers from the last Presidential election (I keep news and pseudo-news like Huffington elsewhere).
This change is caused by my migration to Twitter for politics. I didn't mean for it to happen - I just discovered that the best and most accessible information is there.
Many individual reporters now have Twitter feeds, some columnists and many newspaper beats or departments do too. They often Tweet much more than they can get published in their own papers. Once in a while I'm astonished they're not fired for what they Tweet - especially some of the live reports from outside the USA. Twitter posts can have only 140 characters, similar to a text message. If a Tweet shows a link, clicking on it takes you to a real web page with a more complete article.
This is a contrast to the morass of Facebunk junk - for me that system is clotted with dumb pictures, endless mastication of inner struggles, and people you knew in high school. Too great of a wheat-to-chaff ratio.
I "follow" dozens of individual reporters on Twitter, some who match my views and some who don't. I follow organizations in analysis, literature, politics and science. People in politics Tweet without filtering by media - I only stopped following Sen. McCaskill when she narrated a weekend trip to the mall with her mom - but I still follow President Obama and HH Dalai Lama, as well as Mark Ritchie, Secretary of State of Minnesota, and my nephew Alex who's the mayor of South Orange, NJ. But mostly I follow many journalists and some professors - and I can scan dozens of them in 10 minutes and then read only the best.
You might give Twitter a whirl this election season, if you find yourself needing better info to participate in our election process. Twitter can greatly assist your avoidance of the straight media's Fog of Whore.
Excuse the expression; so many in the media deserve it.
For those who'd rather stick with web sites, my five-slot roll so far this season includes the relatively ancient Talking Points Memo, Fivethirtyeight, and Daily Kos. Two new ones recommended by Nate Silver at 538 are the Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, and the Frontloading blog of Josh Putnam, a political science prof at Davidson College.
My final word on politics for today but not for this season is that my goal is not to find matches with my own values and beliefs. Rather I'm just trying to find the best candidates who are actually out there. I want to work with what we've got and not surrender to pouting powerlessly in the corner.
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| Jimmy Never Pouts |