Regarding the Weekly Picks that are shared on the blog on Sundays.

Preamble – Some may recall a time when social media feeds were chronological. When posts from friends and pages were neatly arranged by time, sans algorithmic shuffling. The presence of the profit motive (advertising creep and predilection for alarmist content) was limited. That was a long time ago.

That old way of reading the web is still how I consume news. Notably, forcing the information flow to be chronological through settings, then clicking based on topics of interest. This digital grounding helps keep me sane in a world where so much information is so easily accessible. Without strong digital literacy skills combined with a solid baloney detection kit, it is difficult to develop an informed or critical view within the battleground of the internet.

The ’Weekly Picks’ that you see are the latest incarnations of social media posts that I used to make many years ago. A collection of usually longer but always engaging commentaries that prompted good discussion. Amongst friends, these were fodder for fun, serious, and sometimes heated discussions. I would create bookmark libraries of these articles, which I still maintain to this day; my own digital archive of in-depth analysis, searchable via key terms. A way to support dialogue-framing between non-experts.

We know that the multi-media specialists and companies dominate the fourth estate. The old-fashioned investigative journalism and longform reporting guided by independent interests is dwindling. Space, time, and money for incisive writing is becoming concentrated as our species navigates its digital infancy. I have noticed, since I began this sharing exercise more than a decade ago, how much the online information landscape has become adulterated. It is appropriate to find it all overwhelming.