Look away from the trending topics
Time was when we had a neutral commons where those of us who wanted to say something could say it, try to earn people’s attention, and choose whether to give them our own. I’m speaking of course of the internet—a long decade ago, before social media swallowed it whole.
The blogosphere of the aughts wasn’t a perfect place; often it was downright horrible. But there was an elegant simplicity to how words got from writer to reader: writers—bad or good, amateur or professional, unfiltered or edited—created a blog that published a feed, and readers bookmarked that blog or subscribed to its feed. We read the people we wanted to read.
A lot of us used Google Reader to do this. This tool for subscribing to feeds was my browser homepage for years. So I enjoyed the latest ode to its sad demise, by Silvia Killingsworth:
