Mainstream media miasma

Image : Janeh15

 What a crashingly unspectacular week it has been for our 2022 election campaign. Media have focused on trivia and tripe. Social media have allowed politicians to speak with us directly  , if they wish , and at least you get the information from the horse's mouth. Twitter has largely swirled the morning bait from the msm sources and pictures and thoughts have been repeated incessantly. If you want a break from that you have to go off on a foraging journey to try and find some good information. Many candidates are new. We need to know more about them. One, in particular, has been high profile this week and it has been too much unpleasant  information. The leader of the opposition didn't know a figure, which was then labelled a gaffe on msm , which was cleverly rebuffed by Green's leader : Google it! But it came back again as a gaffe. They are stuck in a groove and capable of redescribing reality, splicing videos to clean them up, insulting the public and , no, I won't go on. It is uninspiringly dull. Swill. Dirty dishwater. We used to have good election coverage and we used to be able to get a good understanding of candidates and issues. By now, we know LNP  government exceedingly well and we know what the issues are but we are not allowed to talk about them. We are not the only country where mainstream media is driving the general populace mad. Some just get information from social media. Some just tune out as I have said before. Meanwhile , our mainstream media is locked into an alternate reality which is doing it harm. Is it a play to get rid of it? Shall we all then be on Tik Tok, Twitter and Facebook and those sorts of sites? In many ways , throw Twitter a problem and by the end of the day there are many views and solutions. It is a good way to problem solve. Mainstream media and our federal government throw out the bait in the morning and it can often backfire spectacularly but sometimes it just depresses people. Not a good use of an aggregate of well informed, motivated people. Media shouldn't dull the senses and thoughts, especially at election time. Mindless repetition can drive people crazy. And the point is? 

Our media is narrowly owned. We have some good independent sources of news but they need more funding. They are worthwhile and keep us on the ball. AIM has published an article which is well researched and well argued so we can understand the benefits of a broad range of media. Right now we have bland and nothing everywhere. Same message and it is stifling the airways. We need to open up and let the fresh air in and the new ideas with it. 

Pre Covid blog world

 

I hadn't published on this blog since 2016. I thought I was moving it. I was wrong. My life changed, the world changed, everything changed and then it changed again and here I am , back on my Blogger blog. I have been on Blogger since March 2004. This was my first blog so I have quite an attachment to it. Nothing rammed it home better, how much the world had changed, than when I came back and looked at the blogs I had linked here. Some had not been published to for years. I couldn't talk. I had had a gap of 6 years. My blog was still here. There was traffic but not like before. 

I went down my blog list and checked links. Some had been hijacked. Some had been removed, a few were still active, others had had a gap, like I had , but were still there. The world before Covid, where we blogged and shared so many ideas. We shared information, opinions, inspiration. It was a place to learn a lot and get thinking. It was also a place to laugh. 

It feels very quiet here. Before , there was always a buzz. You could feel it. The internet is strange like that. You can't see people but you can feel the activity of the net. 

There are so many other social media platforms now and I belong to some of them. Blogs are still important , though, for exploring ideas, sharing knowledge and offering opinions. 

I have culled the blogs and have revamped my site so it represents the renewal. I do have to upgrade and update this. I am looking forward to it. There is so much varied content on this blog and we need to get back to that : varied content. We must be worn out by now. We must be baffled by a world full of things which are hard to deal with. The only way out of it is to reframe it with our thoughts and ideas. I am grateful for the pre Covid bloggers and how they put such good thoughts my way. I shall be looking for new blogs to share and am looking forward to finding them. 

Social media really, really help

Doesn't matter who it is. If I can find a company/organisation on Twitter and I do not have a complicated request, then I go on Twitter if I want an instant response. It has been by far the best way to sort out my little nuisance problems with anything. It has been fantastic. I almost always get an instant response. I discovered this by accident when I was using my computer to fill in the time while I was being told to wait while someone resolved something for me. By the time they had returned I had got the answer on Twitter by connecting with the organisation there and had moved on to  doing something else!! I have just been sorting out a phone problem as I write this post. It's just too easy. We're dealing with texters so they are really quick on Twitter and I always have TweetDeck going. On Facebook I connect with companies and organisations I deal with and I will get a 24 hour turn around on responses there. It's good and it works. Beats hanging around online or on a phone connection or waiting for an email response. The social media service has been impeccable so I highly recommend it.