That isn’t what was said, nor even inferred.
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Sorry, it wasn’t clear to me what Mindysan33 or danimagoo or Melizmatic were trying to say in their replies. Thx for clarifying.
Speaking of perspective and prejudice, the magazines listed in that excerpt are all written for an audience that has a post-secondary or higher education, with estimated read times of at least 10 minutes. The essay, however, is offered as advice to anyone. For reference, TV and radio news writers (I used to be one) are instructed to write for a viewer with an 8th grade reading comprehension and vocabulary level. So are reporters at most daily newspapers. Estimated reading/viewing/listening time for a story rarely exceeds three minutes.
Now you may read that and sniff how deplorable it is. Having helped make that sausage in my previous career, I’m far from an apologist for corporate news outlets. But you know what’s even worse? Avoiding the news altogether and replacing it with hearsay and gossip from friends and colleagues or whatever the engagement algorithm surfaces on social media (which is how a lot of friends and colleagues communicate with each-other now).
As others have noted, this essay is the product of a privileged person who’s more interested in virtue signaling than he is actually seeing Americans (especially American voters) informed. It was wrongheaded in 2010 before the current resurgence of fascism and the rise of AI, and it’s wrongheaded now.
As we often put these matters in terms of a “media diet”, it brings to mind this critique from Orwell I frequently re-post about a privileged person’s perspective on actual food:
Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.
What’s needed for a better-informed public and electorate is more media literacy and more discernment over which outlets are reputable – highbrow or popular, long-form or short. That’s how we get a demand for short-form news that’s both “tasty” and nutritious. We don’t get that by telling people to avoid the mass media entirely.
The new sometimes conveys hard fact, sometimes emotions, often both. I hate to burst your own bubble, but that goes for the news outlets you follow.
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Reading books is great, but claiming that people should read books as a substitute for timely journalism is ridiculous.
We shouldn’t have to wait months or years for the historians to weigh in before we begin to form opinions on things like “so is this new House Speaker a good development or a bad development?” or “what’s going on in Gaza these days?” or “who won the 2020 election, anyway?”
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Especially when events move even more quickly and with graver consequences than ever before. Forget months or years: no-one can afford to wait even a week to catch up on events, which is why Time and Newsweek are long-gone in their original formats.
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and cows are zombies and the grass is our brains
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A few psychologists have pointed out to me that our brains are very good at defending old ideas, and not great at learning new ones. In the words of one of them: “We don’t like to learn as much as we like to win.”
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… outside a special context like a legislature, where the winning condition is to pass a bill, I don’t know that the point of an argument is to “agree”
Social media happens to be mostly populated by ordinary people rather than by power brokers who have to compromise to accomplish anything 
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From a scientific angle, before the muskrat ruined it, Twitter was actually very important and useful in the scientific community as a way to collaborate and connect with peers while also maintaining connections to the general interested public.
For all it’s failings, the “worldwide public square” was incredibly valuable. In a lot of ways.
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I dunno. Social media seems to work really well for small groups but becomes unstable as capacity grows. It also is impossible for it to be both useful and profitable.
Journalism requires legal and ethical regulation. That takes time and loses money.
I don’t think the tools matter. In the past it was radio, tv, the printing press.
The poison is us.
As a child I had a great deal of naive enthusiasm for the new media… I feel foolish.
That being said I also think abstaining from it and expecting meaningful social change is naive. Like imagining a return to Eden. We can’t escape ourselves via the media but we also can’t escape ourselves by elective abstinence from one or two or a handful of vectors.
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Yes. Twitter seemed so wonderful when I first signed up. So much art, science, jokes, cute animals, book updates, Trekkie lore, memes… I still miss some of it, like the NASA tweets I used to get.
I was lucky enough to get onto BlueSky a few weeks ago. It seems a lot like Twitter as it was when I first signed up (and it helps that a decent chunk of the more prolific accounts I followed had already migrated. No NASA yet, though.) It doesn’t have all the features hooked up yet-- no DMs or GIFs. But it’s small enough now that it’s got more of a community feel to it; that will probably change as more people sign up. It’s definitely a lot less hostile than Xchan (though that might be because I’m in a relatively small “bubble” of accounts following each other.)
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as a way to collaborate and connect with peers while also maintaining connections to the general interested public.
I think it was broken long before Musk let all the crazies on to the platform. You’d have to convince me that the ability to vote on post and anonymous accounts are the at all a necessary component to for scientific collaboration. Moreover, even now, you could simple choose to follow only scientific accounts so that you could block out all the ick. So, in what way is it broken for your purposes?
It’s full of nazis and transphobes… not sure how that’s not a problem in your eyes.
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And, as in any situation where Nazis are tolerated, they start entering and taking over all aspects of life – including scientific collaboration and the academy.
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No, I wouldn’t.
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The key phrase is “for your purposes” which you said was for scientific collaboration. If you don’t want to see them, you can block them. I guess it depends on the level of abstraction that you’re thinking about. To me the problem is that life is full of nazis and transphobes. I don’t see how whether or not they are on Twitter or some other platform makes a huge difference.
That’s not how twitter works. People who are not straight white men who worship Musk are regularly harassed and hounded there now.
But sure, let’s just let them keep colonizing ALL of our public spaces with no pushback, because that will solve all our problems… HEY, I know, let’s elect them to public office and we’ll just hide in our houses and pretend like this is all okay… /s
Seriously, you are downplaying this problem.
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Shitter now openly platforms/privileges genocidal misinfo, Nazis, anti vaxxers and klansmen; why would any decent person want to continue use such a site?
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Well, but just block them and you’ll be fine! It worked in Germany in the 30s! /s
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