Keeping up in the modern age

[rodox_head]

OP is mostly just a stream of consciousness post, hopefully some of it makes sense:

How do people manage to keep up with what's going on in the world these days, or with the constant output of media that comes with the direct streaming capabilities of the internet? There's just so much out there that I don't really get how people go through it all, even something like keeping tabs on BoC's activity on various social media sites is a daunting task for me (which is why I barely post in the BoC subforum these days).

So many films, TV shows, games, podcasts, streams (both live and not), YT content; where does one find the time for all this? Also the news, just as difficult. Biases are rampant and more obvious then ever, and internet news is so often cluttered with ads and the formatting of most sites these days can cause me physical/mental strain just to look at them. It isn't just nostalgia, I actually prefer the way sites looked back in the mid 2000s and before.

Sure I don't watch TV, but I think a lot of people these days don't. I work a nine to five, just at night as opposed to during the day, I'm sure a lot of people do. Where do people find the time to fit all this stuff into their schedule?

So many communities are just a hive mind that repeat the same rhetoric and lame jokes to each other ad nauseam, people trying to be the loudest voice in the bunch. Forums like this I prefer, though they are a dying breed.

I don't really know where I'm going now, but hopefully some discussion to be had here.

[Waterbagel]

really! I think many, many watch content; whether TV, streamers, or some streaming service (netflix, hulu, or any of the growing number of cable-network-turned-streaming-service also-rans)

but, in any case, you've got the group of people that gets paid to view and report on content; that's the group of influencers, or youtube channels about pop culture whose income comes from ads running on their channels, patreons, or some combination.

then there's everyone else. I think few people have much more than a narrow cross-section of some things going on. if you have a mixed crowd in your "feed" of life, then it may seem like everyone knows about everything, but instead, it's just a bunch of people exposing you to different things. even then, they're just the louder ones.

i'm sure several will chime in here to say "i feel like i never know what's going on"; our capacity, as a collection of societies, to both create and distribute content has FAR outweighed any one person's abilities to consume even a small fraction of it

[rodox_head]

really! I think many, many watch content; whether TV, streamers, or some streaming service (netflix, hulu, or any of the growing number of cable-network-turned-streaming-service also-rans)

By TV I meant specifically cable/cable news. Yes people do watch a lot of content, it's just outside my perspective as to how people manage to do that

but, in any case, you've got the group of people that gets paid to view and report on content; that's the group of influencers, or youtube channels about pop culture whose income comes from ads running on their channels, patreons, or some combination.

then there's everyone else. I think few people have much more than a narrow cross-section of some things going on. if you have a mixed crowd in your "feed" of life, then it may seem like everyone knows about everything, but instead, it's just a bunch of people exposing you to different things. even then, they're just the louder ones.

i'm sure several will chime in here to say "i feel like i never know what's going on"; our capacity, as a collection of societies, to both create and distribute content has FAR outweighed any one person's abilities to consume even a small fraction of it

I suppose my problem is due to my isolated situation, as the people I'm mostly surrounded by (i.e. coworkers) primarily have discussions pertaining to video games and sports, neither of which pique my personal interest, nor can I engage with it.

Perhaps the question is how to find what one cares about, and where to find others that do the same. I think I have about half of that figured out. Time is of the essence and it took me nearly half an hour just to type this reply out

[kube]

I recently started using RSS to keep track of news, interests, and some social media. Ancient tech, but I'm enjoying it a lot! Results in a very legible reading experience.

It's a blessing that forums support RSS natively. With other sites (such as Twitter), I gotta use third-party conversion tools.

Do you have an adblocker installed? Not that ads don't creep past either way...

[arvy]

There's some weird people I can tell you that. It is goes hand in hand with these crazy times of information we are living in. They enjoy it, so should you. More - better.

[Fredd-E]

Keeping tabs on all things BoC shouldn’t be a daunting task. Just follow bocpages. I do all the work for you.

[kube]

More RSS blabbering:

You can snag a revision feed of any bocpages article by appending &action=history&feed=atom to the URL

Here's a useful example from the sample list article.

[rodox_head]

I recently started using RSS to keep track of news, interests, and some social media. Ancient tech, but I'm enjoying it a lot! Results in a very legible reading experience.

It's a blessing that forums support RSS natively. With other sites (such as Twitter), I gotta use third-party conversion tools.

Do you have an adblocker installed? Not that ads don't creep past either way...

yeah I have adblocker on my desktop, it still struggles, though that's a hardware issue as well. I don't think I've heard of RSS, so I'm unfamiliar with how it works.

Keeping tabs on all things BoC shouldn’t be a daunting task. Just follow bocpages. I do all the work for you.

And I thank you for that

[kube]

Here's a great overview of RSS!

In short: RSS feeds list out all the new articles from a site. A feed reader periodically scrapes the feeds you subscribe to.

[A_Northern_Soul]

In terms of culture, I let most of it wash by me - the good stuff sticks or I find a way to it.

I'm cutting back the amount of time I spend on social media - I don't think it's healthy to be bombarded with so many opinions and so much news ALL THE TIME. I rarely use Facebook and I've taken to deactivating Twitter for periods if I start finding things heavy going. That said, I do think it's funny and genuinely nice that I have found myself swapping pumpkin recipes with Will Sergeant from Echo & the Bunnymen thanks to social media.

[Orbited insanitarium]

I do often find that the flood of advertisements directed at me is quite difficult to keep up with, where I live at the moment isn’t culturally and technologically busy but it isn’t destitute in those fields ether.

The flurry of recommendations on YouTube that are supposed to be catered towards my interests is scarily accurate, which confuses me because I’ve viewed very few videos (That might have something to do with cookies which follow you around from website to website collecting data for future adverts)
I don’t even know how many cookie spy bots are viewing my posts right now. (Waving hello to google! )
I tend not to even do online shopping because they insist you set up an account and put in all your bank and card details into theirs archives for a better experience.

It does show how we’ve advanced on the online world in the past 10-15 years!

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Although all of the above are nitpicks, there are a lot of benefits to social media and online news outlets, I just occasionally don’t like how mentally tiring the Internet can be sometimes (and that can run into a nostalgia factor)

If I had a time machine and could travel to any year or decade i would stick around in the years 2008-2015, just a good middling period for technology.

[bleak.]

Really interesting topic and somewhat linked to thoughts I've had recently.

I've been interested in the amount of information in which humans are receiving and processing on a daily basis - and the speed in which it's received. If you go back over 100 years or so, prior to the invention of phones, internet, automobiles etc - news/information/media would often be shared by word of mouth or letters. Most news would remain local - and likely to be regarding deaths or marriages. News further afield would take days or weeks to be received. I imagine the world felt a lot bigger back then.

I would assume there would be a closer community and that people would work together in order for that community to function. Note: as I type this, I suppose I have an image of a village in little old West Wales, so my thoughts may not necessarily apply to ALL places - but hope you can catch my drift.

I've tried recently to be conscious of the amount of information on which I'm receiving on a daily basis.

I've recently deactivated Facebook as I noticed the extent in which it could alter my thoughts and feelings. I think it's incredible the ability to become so absorbed with these devices. The ability to disconnect and distract us from our surroundings. These are devices which can record and manipulate our every movement and I truly believe that the less dependent we are of them, the better for our and everyone's mental well-being.

Anyhow...be well all!

[Fredd-E]

Here's a great overview of RSS!

In short: RSS feeds list out all the new articles from a site. A feed reader periodically scrapes the feeds you subscribe to.

I used to be a massive RSS head too. My favorite reader? Feedly!
https://feedly.com/

[kube]

-snip-

Feedly seems great!! FreshRSS is my personal pick, but it's a bit technical to get running.

And then Fluent Reader on both desktop and mobile!

[rodox_head]

I do often find that the flood of advertisements directed at me is quite difficult to keep up with, where I live at the moment isn’t culturally and technologically busy but it isn’t destitute in those fields ether.

The flurry of recommendations on YouTube that are supposed to be catered towards my interests is scarily accurate, which confuses me because I’ve viewed very few videos (That might have something to do with cookies which follow you around from website to website collecting data for future adverts)
I don’t even know how many cookie spy bots are viewing my posts right now. (Waving hello to google! )
I tend not to even do online shopping because they insist you set up an account and put in all your bank and card details into theirs archives for a better experience.

It does show how we’ve advanced on the online world in the past 10-15 years!

In agreement about the YT recommendations, but I hate that they favor the more dopamine center of my attention and not other aspects I'd rather fill. I try to manipulate the system to fill my recs with old rave tracks and obscure albums, but you watch one or two 15-second joke videos and it's all for nothing. YT is such a great source for finding niche music when you game it right. One time I thought to just click on any YT short that an attractive woman front and center on the thumbnail just to see how long it would take before that's all I would see in the feed... didn't take me more than 5 minutes .
Rabbit holes are scary.

Really interesting topic and somewhat linked to thoughts I've had recently.

I've been interested in the amount of information in which humans are receiving and processing on a daily basis - and the speed in which it's received. If you go back over 100 years or so, prior to the invention of phones, internet, automobiles etc - news/information/media would often be shared by word of mouth or letters. Most news would remain local - and likely to be regarding deaths or marriages. News further afield would take days or weeks to be received. I imagine the world felt a lot bigger back then.

I would assume there would be a closer community and that people would work together in order for that community to function. Note: as I type this, I suppose I have an image of a village in little old West Wales, so my thoughts may not necessarily apply to ALL places - but hope you can catch my drift.

I caught it
I think about that kind of thing whenever I pass by the local Slavic church on Sundays; it's always packed with cars all day and I just think about how there are probably a lot of different families in there that know each other, meanwhile it was more difficult than it should be for me to find any info about a murder that happened at a local bar. I guess that's what people use Nextdoor for.

Currently, news from anywhere in the country can capture the public's interest instantly and fade away just as fast, when just 20 or 30 years ago, it would probably stay in the headlines of late night shows for weeks and in the collective memory for months enough for it to end up in an episode of "I Love The 90s" or something later on (anyone remember those shows?). It really puts into question the pertinence of like 90% of what we hear about or are generally exposed to.

I just realized that for someone who listens primarily to electronic genres of music, I'm pretty technologically backwards myself.

[kakanara]

my targeted ads are all over the place, i once got a tampon ad alongside a male pattern baldness cure ad in a row

[sandrail]

The modern state of the internet is filled with terrible and messy proprietary formats. It nowadays consists of network protocols that make no sense, ads in every corner of the screen, an overall monopoly by Google and 1000 companies you've never heard of wanting to know every aspect of your personality for their own unknown services.

Can't we just return to a simpler age? When Microsoft stopped adding proprietary extensions to HTML that only existed in Internet Explorer, before massive ad networks were a thing. When websites were made to talk to people, not be made to collect your data under the guise of a chatting app.

I feel like some time quite soon, the internet is going to crash just like Cable in favor for a much better network. The internet will crash after being polluted by junk websites for years just like the Atari crashed after they kept pumping out cash grabs disguised as games.

hs.gif

[rodox_head]

The modern state of the internet is filled with terrible and messy proprietary formats. It nowadays consists of network protocols that make no sense, ads in every corner of the screen, an overall monopoly by Google and 1000 companies you've never heard of wanting to know every aspect of your personality for their own unknown services.

Can't we just return to a simpler age? When Microsoft stopped adding proprietary extensions to HTML that only existed in Internet Explorer, before massive ad networks were a thing. When websites were made to talk to people, not be made to collect your data under the guise of a chatting app.

Completely agreed

I feel like some time quite soon, the internet is going to crash just like Cable in favor for a much better network. The internet will crash after being polluted by junk websites for years just like the Atari crashed after they kept pumping out cash grabs disguised as games.

The whole thing? I'm not so sure, unless virtual reality ends up becoming the norm. With every major social media/internet based company having their hands the cookie jar that is the current entertainment zeitgeist, I doubt they'll come tumbling down without an external force going against it (e.g. a major lawsuit, political revolution). One startling observation I read in a YT comment section was that if a major company like Facebook were to handle the future of virtual reality, then there is an economic incentive to make life worse for the general population. Of course, humanity is becoming sedated enough to not feel the need to fight back.

However, I am curious to see if there will be any future entertainment crashes a la the Atari crash with how major publishers are pushing out shoddy cash grabs at a much more contemptuous level *cough cough* Rockstar *cough* and a greater interest in smaller indie projects.

[dcom]

For news and other internet-related information I'm a staunch old-school RSS feed supporter; I've been using Feedly after Google Reader was shuttered. I've procrastinated on implementing my own feed reader (I've been a professional web backend programmer for decades) for a long time, but as of now Feedly is good enough. I've never had any social media accounts and never will - I steer clear of everything of the sort (also due to being a technological humanist with a high regard for my mental environment). I subscribe to the main Finnish newspaper and a couple of magazines, and I read plenty of books (and comics!) in both dead tree and electronic versions. I buy all music I listen to and play as a DJ (both physical and digital), I don't rent/stream from rent-seeking-cream-skimming music subscription services like Spotify (which I loathe in so many ways that it would require a separate post). The only television I watch in real time are news, I mostly use time-shifting and/or VOD services like Netflix and HBO Max - I rotate between them as interesting things become available.

[Gazebo4]

I think the answer is rather simple, stop trying to keep up. If you learn to spend time in silence with just yourself, you will automatically be attracted to things you really want or need to do. And when you are done with the activity, be it mental or physical, you just enjoy being with yourself again, without any need for external stimulation all the time.

There is you, and there is the world with the 1001 things to do/experience. And while all of that can be beautiful, life is not about adding content to yourself all the time, even though many people live like that. Contentment and peace are not gained by adding content to yourself, but rather seeing that these are actually what you are already. And when you start seeing that, you can still do anything you want and enjoy all those beautiful experiences, but you don't need them to be content and at peace.

Look at it like this, all experiences you have, had and will have come and go. They are all bound to the dimension of time. However the only thing that never comes and goes is you, the awareness behind all the experiences! And recognizing the timeless essence which you are is how peace and happiness are found. Then all there is left is the joy of being alive. No need to keep up with anything, but if you want you can surely do so of course. But it's never a problem or obstacle anymore. Or in other words, there is freedom to keep up with something or to not keep up, it doesn't matter in the end.

EDIT: I forgot to say that the OP is totally relatable though!