Lately I have been trying to stay on top of the news more. Despite 2020 being “the year everyone stayed put” a lot still happened. And I have been frankly embarrassed at myself for not being able to keep up more with what’s going on in the world. I would read the occasional headline on the South China Morning Post or browse through Reddit’s top page. But that has only produced an opinion that is wide but not deep, and a far call from being fully informed.
This came to a head with the recent controversy over WhatsApp’s new privacy policy where I had only managed to scratch the surface of the issue and had not really dug deep enough to fully appreciate the significance of the shift. It took a friend of mine, who reads far more news than I do, to explain to me just how impactful this new privacy policy could be, and how I was wrong to make light of this issue. As a self-proclaimed technologist this was more than embarrassing. So I committed to being better. I needed to read the news more.
But doing something like that is often times easier said than done. The news cycle in the 21st century is fast. And it comes from all multitude of different directions and outlets. Each outlet having its own website that I would have to navigate, and it has these “personal algorithms” that they use to serve you the news that it thinks you want to see. All of which only perpetuates the problem of…
