I’ve been slow to formulate my 2016 resolutions. One of them is around my information diet. I am still working on a pithy formulation of this, but here’s the longwinded version.

I’ve blathered a lot to date in this blog about my media outputs, but not much about my media inputs.

Here are some problem areas:

  • I spend a lot of time on Facebook, and as a consequence, live in a bit of an echo chamber. I do get a lot of my news from there. As such, I am dependent on not only other people (who I trust) but also Facebook’s famous “algorithm” which picks and chooses what I see and what I don’t see based on past behavior (which I don’t trust).
  • Not only is the content of what I get determined by my Facebook habit, but the frequency and quantity of how I get it is via Facebook, which also tends to mean I do a lot of mindless scrolling when I am bored, in bed, waiting for something to happen at work, waiting for food to finish in the microwave, etc.

Some strategies to break free of the algorithm:

  • Better tools. I am starting to check my RSS reader again. RSS is great, and it lets you pick your sources, and then stuff comes to you. I still hate twitter, and it stinks for news flow for the same reasons FB does.

  • Better sources. In my RSS reader, I already have a bunch of interesting sources of news. Honestly, while I love a lot of the links that people on FB feed me, the sources I have in Feedly are much richer, draw from far more varied sources themselves, link to longer articles with more substance and less click-bait-y headlines. I might also start making the rounds of some media websites directly; despite RSS’s virtues, I have never liked the way it minimizes and flattens everything into the same style without importance or design idiosyncracies.
  • Better consumption habits. This one is experimental but I am thinking about using FB but not using my timeline as an input. In other words, I go to FB, and then click through people I know always point to interesting stuff or who want an update on, maybe on a daily or weekly basis. I find I miss a lot of stuff about people I care about because its drowned out by frequently-posting friends. Being deliberate about who and what I see on FB accomplishes the goals of breaking free of the algorithm pretty directly.

This is all a work in progress. Watch this space.