Once upon a time I was a young passionate person without much routine.
I could learn things and absorb new information from a plethora of sources that kept me in the loop. Unfortunately for my Canadian self, my habits were largely baked into social media. In particular Facebook news sharing kept me in the loop.
Then one day in 2023 the news stopped being shared.
Since then I’ve found it exceedingly difficult to stay connected to the general comings and goings.
I’ve also gotten more involved in my community and realized there’s these giant knowledge gaps that take place with regards to how things work in a city.
There is no property among my assets and no children have come from the fruit of my loins.
My social circles aren’t really keeping me in the loop and clearly I need new habits for what’s going on in the world around me.
There’s no cable, radio, newspaper or regular source of news in my life
I, like many others out there, don’t pay for the news.
As I write this out I have no idea if I reflect the masses or I’m some ignorant minority. I don’t go to the News websites and browse what’s happening. When I’m in the whip, it’s podcast time, and I’m not listening to the radio.
I’ve never paid for cable so I don’t really tune into the news like that either.
For me it’s all about clips.
I recognize I can make more of an effort to follow local news on YouTube, but in truth the entire browsing local news process sucks. It’s as bad as browsing on Netflix, only to watch 2 minute videos on snippets of stories without much detail.
It’s not lost on me I’m describing a lot of “me problems” I could change.
At least if I want to hear about things like school board elections and local bike path updates.
The unfortunate reality is I have to go consume stuff I find boring if I want to know.
Once swallowing that pill, finding the information is still a challenge.
Information dispersal is super complicated and we need a good centralized hub
Getting people interested in local issues is complicated.
People seem to care when the information is in front of their faces. The problem is that informing them of the key things is as saturated a race for attention as everything media related. Especially since news is often just media.
While we do have The Suburban newspaper and a few other institutions that cover news, there doesn’t seem to be an effective place for me to go and learn what I need in one location. I’m left to search for things on my own, without knowing what the search terms are.
Unless my social group were to suddenly care (they really don’t care about local stuff) I feel at a loss of how to organically add the news into my life.
Maybe there’s an app out there that can capture any local news information I need to know about as a Montrealer and feed it to me.
I bet this can be done with AI. I should train a ChatGPT bot to fetch me local news. Apparently there aren’t a lot of people interested in creating ecosystems that reach people beyond traditional platforms.
Or if they exist they are God awful at targeting people like me.
End of the day it’d be cool if the city invested in a local news amalgamator in English.
Like everything else, staying informed is a question of habits
In each moment we choose what we want to do.
There are plenty of moments in a day that could be invested in staying informed. There are likely communities out there I can join with other interested folk that like being in the know. We can wax poetic on the comings and goings of local politics.
When I encounter deficiencies my impulse is to blame the system.
In this case, I can make a wish list of things I want to happen, like Meta letting us share the news again, but the valuable choice is to remain accountable for my actions.
It’s me that decided I don’t know enough. It’s on me to take the time and learn the things I should be staying on top of. Then I can go exercize my democratic rights, to their fullest.
Plus if you really take the time to learn the stuff that people choose to ignore at large, those same masses will trust you more.
All I can say is the algorithms won’t feed you the truth. The powers that be want to make it easy for you to ignore the process. Don’t let the status quo remain, get involved.
It’s pretty boring until you are invested, then it gets lit.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone