Internet a Great Information Source, But Old Data Often Disappears

When I was updating my cumulative running record yesterday, I naturally clicked on some of the links of races held years ago.  In almost every one of the articles, somewhere I would offer a link to the site that had posted the particular results online.  Unfortunately, for most of the links I found closed-down webpages...that doesn't mean that the results were necessarily lost, though.  There are now websites, most notably Athlinks, that have researched past public running races across the country and compiled them...I found quite a few of my old races in their database.  I am grateful for this blog for I wonder, had I not faithfully written up each race as they happened, that I would have lost any record of them ever having taken place.  Then I extended that thought to other areas in my life and realized that there is a place for personal journaling, which includes writing about my experiences and thoughts that I might not necessarily share with the world over a public blog.  In his recent book Level Up, personal development podcaster Rob Dial emphasizes the importance of personal journaling, offering topical cues at the end of each chapter. While his reasons for journaling make sense, I also see in it the retention of past details, recorded when they happened and then lying dormant for future reference.  The Internet, to be sure, is loaded with information...but old websites sometimes just wither away, it seems...along with the data they had previously offered.  I'm grateful for sites like Athlinks that try to preserve old online records, but not every area in life is conducive to that level of data recovery...

About This Blog and a Potential Podcast

This blog, begun in April of 2007, now has more than 5,540 posts and I'm not even remotely considering ending it...for me it's been a successful disciplined exercise and outlet for my writing.  Although I have intentionally striven to avoid excessively personal and dramatic articles, at times my passions regarding a particular subject can come out on the page...that's good since this never was to be a dry, technical manual.  This is a personal journal, designed to have one foot objectively planted in the world around me and the other in my own inner world over which subjectivity reigns supreme. It's the intersection of these two worlds that defines reality for me.  Personal opinions and sometimes emotional reactions to what I experience, either in my daily walk or from being exposed to media news sources, are things that I naturally expect to often differ from those of other people.  The problem I see nowadays is that the expected bedrock of factual information, where that first foot is supposed to securely stand, also differs vastly from one individual to another. People have deliberately chosen to believe alternate realities and, with the choices that they have with their information sources, can now completely surround themselves with only that which affirms their prejudices and biases and either condemns or ignores differing and possibly challenging conclusions that could be drawn from a more realistic presentation of the news.  So, this is the world I live in in the year 2023, and I don't see things improving on this front anytime in the near future.  As for my personal expression, I am thinking of establishing my own brief podcast, in the same vein as this blog to serve as a consistent periodic disciplined exercise, not in writing though, but rather in speaking.  Since my speaking ability has always lagged far behind that of my writing, this should pose a bit of a challenge to my fear of rejection.  As a precursor to me starting out on this venture, I have decided to "schedule" my daily solo drives to work and back as "carcasts" in which I verbally speak out on a predetermined topic (with myself as the entire audience), much in the same way I write.  I figure if I do this enough times to place myself in a kind of habitual speaking "groove", then some of the awkwardness involved in improvised speaking specifically for effective podcasting can be exercised away and I can grow into this new activity.  I also need to find a suitable outlet for podcasts...since Google has served me nicely with this blog, I think I'll start there. Do you have a podcast or blog, and have you ever considered doing one?   

Working on Reorganizing Personal Information System

This book I just read (and wrote about), Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte, has made a big impact on my thinking, and it's occupying a good deal of my "free" time right now as I construct a personal data and retrieval system that complements what I already have "in my head".  It's fun and at the same time a bit tedious...but once I have everything in place this all should make my life flow a lot more smoothly.  But it does take time and I may have to scrap whole ways of doing things in order to make it work better for me.  I recommend the book, and who knows: you might just pick up better on Forte's often arcane language than I did.  But I did clearly get his core message, having lived through a muddle of excessively tangled, disorganized information for years...

Just Finished Reading Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte

Tiago Forte is a computer/IT expert with an interesting premise: that we all could use a "second", external brain, in which the incredible amount of detailed information we accumulate over the years is processed, prioritized, organized and arranged for easy access.  Forte believes that use of digitalized notetaking apps can greatly enhance the function of this all, although traditionally people have relied on notepads and other paper-based media...count me as one of them.  He expresses this in his 2022 book Building a Second Brain, which I just finished reading.  I agree with that premise of his, although his language is such that I felt as if Mr. Spock on Star Trek were feeding me a lot of incomprehensible gobbledygook without actual laying out specifics on how to maneuver around the often very arcane field of knowledge management, especially as it applies to using computer technology.  Forte also has a tendency to go heavy on acronyms...not a good way to endear me to his message. Still, I recognize that over the years I have been bombarded with information and memories, much of which is lost, deeply buried in my mental recesses without an effective means to retrieve it.  Fortunately, with some things...like my running record and list of books and short stories read...I have this very blog as an external memory device...and therefore an element of Forte's suggested "second brain": I just need to streamline the data and make the articles with all the info easy to access.  That's why I used yesterday's article to update my running race history: I plan to place links on each race entry to be able to quickly access the pertinent articles.  I plan to do the same with my reading list...that project is going to be much longer, though.  And there are some areas more personal and financial in nature, for which using a public blog is inappropriate, yet still demanding a better external organization of prioritized and retrievable information.  So, although the author's writing style, in my opinion, left a lot to be desired, his core message strongly resonates with me as I already see a strong need to better organize my personal information.  Thank you, Tiago Forte...

Quote of the Week...from Steve Jobs

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.  Don't be trapped by dogma...which is living with the results of other people's thinking.                                           ---Steve Jobs

Just a couple of Fridays ago I quoted the late Steve Jobs. The late cofounder of Apple had some pretty profound things to say.  I dare say that most of us do as well, if as Jobs has suggested, we listen to our own inner voices and not allow the noise of others and their dogma drown out our own capacity for independent, realistic and positive thought.  I don't need a religious guru, political radio/TV commentator, or narcissistic business tycoon/politico to regale me with their spin on things, as if I can't figure it out for myself.  The problem, though, in this age when we can almost instantly have vast amounts of information on our smartphones...including news of the world, our country and localities...is that bias and dogma are now pervasively inherent in even the selection by various news sources as to what is reported (and what isn't), with that undesirable, underlying dogma often just in the background, out of sight.  Bill O'Reilly once had a show on FoxNews called the No-Spin Zone, but he himself was one of the worst ever spinners of information to custom-fit his own dogma.  It's only too easy in these days to hear or read a particular news story and get carried away with it...before my rational mind filters it all through what I already know to be true, and to discern what the sources and their motivations might be behind its telling.  Figuring out the news has gotten a lot more complicated...

Quote of the Week...from Groucho Marx

Who are you going to believe...me or your own eyes?.    --Groucho Marx

The witty, acerbic member of the twentieth century comedy team Marx Brothers, Groucho Marx had a lot of funny sayings...another I like is from the movie Duck Soup: "Why, a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child.  I can't make head nor tail out of it."  The above quote I did select sadly has a lot of relevance to today's world of disinformation, conspiracy theories and innuendo. I, like you, am a fellow traveler through this strange time of mass digitalization and nearly universally available news sources due to cell phone/Internet technology as well as a multitude of different "news" channels on television, tailored to reinforce the preconceived notions of their viewers.  Social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, and search engines like Google employ algorithms to discern their users' interests and politics...and then present material that promotes them.  I distinctly remember Trump's 2017 presidential inauguration and the general sparsity of people attending it in person...and his claim to the effect that it was a record-setting crowd.  And then his yes-people went out into the media to parrot that false claim.  About all these mass shootings, the Covid pandemic and the 2020 election, I've seen these issues all for what they were and yet the media is loaded with those promoting denial and lies: and people believe them and not their own eyes!  I'm not sure people in general haven't changed...they've always had this kind of tribalism to them that sways them to accept "facts" that are untrue just to fit in with their group.  What's different is how this omnipresent digital input is affecting how different folks distinguish reality from fantasy...or whether they actually want to...

Quote of the Week...from Soren Kierkegaard

There are two ways to be fooled.  One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.                                                       Soren Kierkegaard

Soren Kierkegaard was an 19th century Danish existential philosopher, essayist and Christian scholar.  I found his above quote in a posting on Facebook by local radio (WKTK) announcer Storm Roberts: its message couldn't be more applicable in today's world of alternative facts, bizarre conspiracy theories, habitually-leveled accusations of hoaxes and rigging, insulated information bubbles within social and broadcast media, out-of-context reporting, gaslighting, cancel culture, retroactive political correctness, historical revisionism, and foreign-inspired disinformation campaigns...to name a few of the ongoing trends.  In his quote Kierkegaard distinguishes between two types of being fooled.  I think both are commonly in play in our contemporary society that is loaded with the aforementioned avenues through which deception is routinely conveyed.  But I think the Danish academic left out another important way to be fooled.  Talk show hosts on radio and TV...as well as Facebook and Twitter advocates...regularly present their own political and social philosophies in terms of well-grounded, appealing principles while attacking their opponents personally or through sound bites and anecdotes...the aim is present those "other guys" as having no principles at all.  The solution as I see it is for any broadcaster who wants to be seen as fair to allow for principled discussion of the issues in our time with an implicit understanding that the participants to lay off the personal invective.  We actually did have such shows in the past like William F. Buckley's Firing Line and the Dick Cavett Show...where the quests, regardless of their viewpoints, were afforded the time...without repeated interruption as is usually the case nowadays...to lay out their visions and philosophies.  I suggest that if you ever find yourself listening to talk radio or TV to practice discerning what they're up to...I actually am quite open to listening to people defending their worldviews by espousing the principles behind their beliefs. It's them tearing into their perceived adversaries that leaves me cold...a major reason why I steadfastly avoid late night "comedy" talk shows on TV. If you're letting them be your major source of news then you're fooling yourself...