Life without social media has taught me the virtues of being social

Here is the fifth article in the series written by the autonomist and luddite author Mark Boyle, published in The Guardian between 2016 and 2019. His critique of the media, however, is somewhat flawed, as he implies that there could be “good” and “bad” journalism. In reality, the media system is a subsystem of the techno-industrial system, whose goal is, among other things, to embed the industrialist/technologist/scientific ideology in the collective mindset. As Kaczynski demonstrates, the mass media also plays a key role in corrupting revolutionaries, redirecting their energy and anger, and using it to further the expansion of the techno-industrial system.

You can read the other texts by Mark Boyle here:

1. Technology destroys people and places. I’m rejecting it

2. Lessons of living like a prince outside cyberia

3. Bored? No way. Ditching technology makes life complicated and beautiful

4. Environmentalism used to be about defending the wild – not any more

5. Living without technology taught me about life in society;

6. You don’t need modern medicine to be healthy;

7. Living without technology is not romantic;

8. We must resist, revolt, and rewild ourselves;

9. Disconnecting from the industrial world helped me discover what reality really is.

__________

At the end of last year I gave up the technologies that transmit news and social media. But I actually quit the media themselves a year before that. Like all good decisions, it was made in the pub, over a pint with a friend – a neighbour, who also writes for this newspaper (though, like me, does not write not about the news). Until then I would keep religiously informed about world affairs online – via the Guardian, naturally – over breakfast every morning.

It wasn’t that I thought news to be a bad thing per se – though most of it tends to be bad news – but I no longer wished to read it. For a start, I found it was becoming boring. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in the 19th century, long before Twitter and 24-hour news: “If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up … we never read of another. One is enough.” It has all become a bit like a Hollywood movie: same storylines, different characters.

That said, I would often miss the opinion pages, especially those that explored ideas that could benefit the world around us. The conundrum, however, as I saw it was that the technologies behind the new, relentless news were part of the problem, harming journalism itself.

Read the full version:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/10/social-media-24-hour-news-cycle