Why I share OLD bookmarks
This month, I started sharing lots of OLD (5 or more years old) web pages. Yesterday, I discovered why.
<u><em><strong>CAPTION:</strong>
<a href="https://bookmarks.zona-m.net" target="_blank">Click to browse my online bookmarks, and know what topics I follow for fun and profit</a>
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More exactly, I started sharing some of the bookmarks I have accumulated here in more than twenty years of Web surfing.
I started doing it simply because I feel that the Web is great, but locks us too much into the present. But if we remember what happened, or what certain things looked like just a few years ago, it is much easier to make informed decisions, or at least more civil debates, about current problems.
But after just a couple of days of this “memory-sharing” I found this wonderful piece about “The problem with REAL news” which explains even better than I myself originally had in mind why it is a good idea. Here are the points relevant to my sharing, but read the whole piece, it is golden:
- News in its traditional forms is the problem with journalism. Currently, news is all about… current events.
- Almost everything that’s news must be something that has just now taken place. But the most recent thing isn’t by definition the most influential one.
- Not only does this skew our view of other human beings, news also makes us blind to the influential that is not exceptional at all.
- The problem isn’t liberal bias, it’s recency bias
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
I do it because YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you.
To this end, I have already shared more than a million words on this blog, without any paywall or user tracking, and am sharing the next million through a newsletter, also without any paywall.
The more direct support I get, the more I can continue to inform for free parents, teachers, decision makers, and everybody else who should know more stuff like this. You can support me with paid subscriptions to my newsletter, donations via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net) or LiberaPay, or in any of the other ways listed here.THANKS for your support!