With Twitter on the wane, I’ve been thinking about how to keep in touch with news and current affairs while protecting my mental health.
Context: I am very privileged as I can take a break from many issues without them imposing on my everyday life. I also have a habit of caring a lot about everything, getting overwhelmed and then doing very little about any of it. On Twitter it is easy to get sucked into the daily ‘main character’ discourse and engage shallowly on many issues.
Here’s what I’m trying out:
Continuing
- No breaking news alerts from anyone, anywhere (I highly recommend this).
- When at home of a weekday evening, watching BBC London News and Channel 4 News for a general update. Maybe 2-3 days a week.
- Following the RSS feeds (yes I’m old-school) via Feedly of local SE London news outlets/bloggers – currently 853 and From the Murky Depths. I also give each a small amount of money monthly as local news is important to me.
- BBC Radio 6 Music news – this is kinda forced on me because I listen regularly. I find the framing of stories very interesting including how they evolve through a show. Also a good way to get an impression of what ‘most people’ are hearing about news in the UK.
- Podcasts (via Pocket Casts on Android) – the only fully topical ones are the BBC’s More or Less, The News Quiz and The Grenfell Tower Inquiry Podcast (latter nearing its end). Radiolab and BBC Seriously… venture into some news/current affairs.
- Very occasional browsing of The Guardian app.
New / newish
- Reading the daily Sensemaker on weekdays from Tortoise, and dipping into their other reporting. I got a free year’s digital membership from them after going to a music/talks festival they ran in Oxfordshire in June. Just saw how much this costs so will have to see how my finances look when the renewal comes up!
- Reading Folded with Adam Bienkov for general British politics.
- Adding a couple of new news feeds to Feedly – Gal-dem (I used to rely on their Twitter to hear about new articles) and The 19th for when I want to dip into US news (partly because my friend Ben now works there!).
Cutting down / quitting
- Getting news from people I follow on Twitter. I’ve recently set up a Mastodon account and will see how this pans out for finding out about news without the overwhelm. Maybe exactly the same thing will happen. My main worry about cutting down is being cut off from hearing the voices of marginalised groups, particularly outside the UK/US.
Closing thoughts
Writing this all down has been really interesting – it’s made me realise that actually I am already consuming a lot of news and current affairs content (and a lot of that is BBC-provided!). Other than the concern about picking up things outside the mainstream media, perhaps I’m expecting too much of myself…
Multi-faceted 