I compiled a news and periodical links page for you to bookmark on your browser (or phone— it’s mobile-compatible) providing a wide range of sources and perspectives. Feel free to bookmark or share with others.
Bookmarks and links pages are an alternative to the feeds and timelines of social media, meant to supplement rather than supplant them. The very attributes that have made social media so successful, as far as connectivity, have also given rise to its considerable failings. Much e-ink has been spilled over the darker sides of social media: that they are highly centralizing corporate behemoths that structure the sensible and exploit sociability according to opaque, proprietary algorithms engineered for their own gains, rather than the benefit of the public. This is entirely true, but only half the story. The other half is the user. Like most systems with power at play, both structure and agency must be taken into account. For even if social media were non-profit or public, and were completely decentralized and organized according to open and democratically derived algorithms, as a semi-competitive space with exploitable conditions of success, the end result would still depend greatly upon the behavior of users. Links pages, which have fallen into only nostalgic use, encourage more self-direction and decentralization, and shape the overall structure of the internet slightly more conscientiously (since search engines are greatly though not entirely organized by these links, in ways that social media stifle). Even the random or inattentive clicking across the news links helps break up the overconsolidations and predeterminations of the feed, done not as some revolutionary act, but merely to encourage better habits. Aggregation has its benefits as well as its limits. Connectivity has its benefits as well as its limits. I encourage you to bookmark this links page, or create your own, rather than always and only waiting for news and articles to float down the stream of social media.