Media diet

Well, yeah, y'know that's just like your opinion, man.

Over on MetaFilter recently, there was a long and opinionated thread about the nature and ethics of piracy. It's quite difficult to square 
a) journalism is work, journalists should get paid
with
b) there was a time when MegaMedia loaded their intellectual property IP up on the internet and we-all could read it for free. 

I've always maintained that the World would now be a better a place if, like for electricity, we'd all been charged 1c for every MegaByte we 'used'. We'd be more thrifty on the servers. 

Free media was how it was at the Birth of The Blob in 2013/'14/'15. I could surf around the web and read news and commentary; quote something; add my own bit of Talmudary; and post it all on The Blob. Nowadays, not so much, I don't read Food & Wine or Vanity Fair or New Yorker or Nature or Science because they are all behind paywalls. Which is fair enough because journalists should get paid. I'll preen myself a bit by asserting that I always tried / try to add something extra to the debate in any Blobs I posted. Many failed to do that, merely re-churning the basic facts of the case often lifting whole phrases and sentences from the original. A practice [plagiarism] which we used to forbid our students at The Institute. Obvs, my years of Sunday Round-up (mostly YT) were an exception of whc I am now ashamed.

There are ways of circumventing paywalls often involving various archive sites which are trying to capture the ephemeral internet. Just to note that Nature and Science is a slightly different case. Both periodicals employ journalists to write copy: opinion, commentary, overview and explanation. These people are paid and readers should pay for access. But the majority of pages in any issue of these keystone publications are taken up with original primary scientific research reports.  For other scientific journals All the pages are scientific papers. The hard graft of creating the IP and writing about it is already paid for - largely by research grants from government or foundations. So Elsevier are gouging punters when they charge $50 to read one article. Other MegaPublishers are available. I've ranted extensively about this. Sci-Hub will get you older 'copyright' scientific pubs.

Fungible media. But Science is not my beef today. I didn't contribute to the MetaFilter discourse but my hot take is that it don't matter tuppence if you cannot access That article which someone else recommends. If you're alert and curious, the gap in your knowledge will be filled with something else . . . anything else? Literature is fungible, I guess I'm saying. There is plenty of choice [R Easons Waterford Ryw Station 1924]. All grist to the mill of keeping the grey cells active. And maybe less is more? My father enrolled in a speed-reading course at the age of 80 because there was so much to read but so little time. It killed him in the end. 

If you feel you spend too much time restlessly scrolling then cold turkey works for me. I've taken a fortnight off from YouTube, Metafilter in the past just to cool down. And I paused the Blob's Sunday Miscellany a while back because my TY links are contributing to someone else's glazed-eye dopamine issues aka GEDI.

Of course if you're alert and specifically curious you will have already subscribed to Matchboxes Quarterly or Model Railway Tunneller.