I don't want to be the frog that died in water that was turned up a few degrees at a time, so I am setting up a little challenge for myself: I want to go 6 months, June to December, with my information diet restricted to books and my The Best of the Free Internet list. I don't want advertisements beyond tepid whimpers asking to support the site. I am trying to rebuild my attention and focus.
I was on vacation for the first week of June, so it was easy enough to begin the habit. I didn't get on the internet at all. Since then, I have stayed to my rules. Any instances of links that don't follow my rules were gathered before I went on the trip.
This is most restrictive media diet I have put myself on since the first six months what I call My Walden Years. As I am married, I have less control over my environment than I did in those days when everything was as Jim Morrison of The Doors said "everything was simpler and more confused." I am not going for complete monastery-like purity. I won't interfere with my wife's wish to watch Netflix during dinner. And while it is possible that I avoid seeing a movie in a theater the entire time, if I don't, I will watch those incessant ads -- I mean highly entertaining trailers -- but I will not use it as an excuse to rant.
My round-up posts may very well suffer greatly during this time. And for that matter, my other posts may as well, since I am not going to engage in research beyond my little open-source playground. On the other hand, I could see this potentially helping me to find my own voice, and it could prevent me from getting bogged down in opening a bunch of tabs, trying to figure out what evidence and quotes I can draw on from other sites. (As I have stated before, I would positively welcome being e-mailed with links or quotes of others with similar ideas, especially those who have expressed them earlier, or better.)
==
Degringolade wrote a piece responding to last week's post. He concludes:
Folks don't talk about politics as a means of solving our problems anymore. They talk about politics as a vehicle to vent their hatred and to affix blame for the inexorable decline of a country that seems intent for a class/civil war and a far-too-interesting interregnum.
