Viewpoint Fatigued

I'm newsed out. I'm shuled out. Opinioned out. Not yet crossed over the line to Jewed out, but I can see that line not very far off. And the Iggles season endured too long.  I kinda know what Trump is about and who supports him.  I can tell who marches with a fist in the air while shouting a slogan for the disappearance of Israel.  And I know who refutes them and how they respond.  And I can tell who wants to manipulate me in some way.  I don't even have to go to Twitter for that.  The notices from my shul where the Influencers think I should comply with what they want me to do come to my email a few times a week.

I got the hang of this by now.  And I'm really not receptive to the next post on Twitter or even the FB politically oriented pitch, despite their being generated by some of the dearest people you can hope to know or the finest friends you can hope to have.                        

To make this more unbearable, somebody who attended lectures at a university that wouldn't let me attend took classes on how to keep me glued to my screen by selecting what to toss my way.  Eventually they are no longer right.  It moves from engagement to the rejection of the very engagement that the expert with the algorithm thinks I might most like to have.

Part of the limitation may be that very little of this is truly interactive.  My forty years as an active physician had me interviewing people multiple times a day, whether patients at the bedside or in the exam room, nurses on the in-patient units, residents sharing the care, or consultants who come to help out.  Art Linkletter knew that Kids Say the Darndest Things.  So do patients. So do people at committee tables. Often their comments or questions are not what I anticipated.  Yet each situation intentionally included me in the dialog.  And it is a dialog.  It is a back and forth of ideas that can take unplanned directions.  It is sometimes having more expertise, sometimes upgrading my ability, since I started with less knowledge or experience than my partner.  And because the directions shift within seconds, at least in my medical world as new information is piled atop what was there before, there is something engaging about it.

Our screens really don't have that.  On Twitter, properly now rated X, where I have had the good fortune to avoid the truly viral toxins, I can comment to people of public prominence and accomplishment, but it is never on their agenda to respond to me, and for the most part they don't.  Had I made the same comment in a public seminar, they would have to respond.  Indeed, my Senators and Congressional representatives have done just that live and in person.  I know not to pose a question whose answer I can anticipate.  

On FB I know most of the people.  I've seen some of them live since enrolling on the service in 2009.  They are very different live.  While I admire the things that interest them as individuals, be it science, their trips, their fondness for restaurants, coping with Covid, their interests in cooking, even their political stances which often differ from mine, the screen is not interactive.  They can figure out from my messages that I time my week to shabbos, like cooking dinner, and analyze a professional report expertly, and am part of the sports fabric of my hometown, they really don't quite know how my mind works, nor do I have a good grasp of any of theirs.

Of the places where I express myself, the most suitable may be Reddit in is various subdivisions.  People sometimes come to pitch their agendas, but they often come seeking guidance, and this is generously offered.  I do not know what question will be posed on r/Judaism tomorrow.  I do know that when I open my Twitter screen, there will be attacks from the Left, from the Right, the retired CEO of AJC who I thoroughly admire professionally will tell me the same facts too many times, the Opinion Editor of The Forward, which I read daily, will have comments not very different from the usual comments, somebody will call Trump a criminal, which I think he is, and somebody will respond how the Trumpists brought America closer to its potential.  I just don't want to be there, and I really don't have to.

Interestingly, my shul has started inviting me to do stuff worth doing, though it is not the Influencers who took that initiative.  They still run Nominating Committees who populate the Board with Vacant since Nobody could offer more insight than me.  So while I am excluded, I presume by intent by Influencers, from the creative elements, I have more of a niche that bypasses the Gatekeepers.

What none of these forums, not synagogue, not Social Media in its various formats, has been able to do is what David Brooks in his most recent book regarded as the essence of personal interaction.  That is the ability to get people who want to tell Their Story to tell it.  That is the essence of medicine which may be why I found my time there so captivating.  To a large extent, it is the essence of Jewish Scripture, yet squashed in the name of Leadership, both in Torah to some extent, and in our Jewish institutions by design.

Our social media, X, FB, Reddit, all attract millions.  But they don't really have millions.  They have one person replicated a million times who makes a comment to a poster who really was not somebody who accomplished anything on X but may have accomplished quite a lot external to X by the position they hold in Journalism, elected office, or some other form of celebrity, where they already have a forum to promote Their Story.  The rest of need a forum to tell ours.  And X, FB, Reddit, and my shul all seem not quite up to this challenge.

I'm screened out.  I'm shuled out.  I need people to tell me the Darndest Things.