Okay, not exactly. But let me explain.
For a while, after the first several months I had been updating the Planet Waves blog with news items and I felt like I was really in the swing of things, I discovered that Facebook could be a treasure trove of links and leads.
I often heard important headlines on programs like Democracy Now! and All Things Considered, but the Facebook feed brought me a new angle on stories of the curious, the unjust and the uplifting. Best of all, some of these items came from people whose views might not quite match mine, or who lived elsewhere in the world and therefore had easy access to different sources and perspectives.
It seemed to work great for a while, but as I was asked to work on other projects, my news-sniffing slowed and I let a slight shift in the blog’s rhythm become a bit bigger than intended. Then about a month ago, I encountered two interviews with Eli Pariser: one on The Diane Rehm Show on NPR, the other on Democracy Now! The former executive director of MoveOn.org has written a book called The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. As I listened, it dawned on me that I haven’t been seeing the same variety of posts in my News Feed for a while; that they haven’t had the same cultural/political weight; that I’d forgotten some people were even on my list of friends.