Boost Your Signal to Noise Ratio – Self Care Month Day 5

In olde internet times, we would talk about the quality of the information we’d encounter by referring to the good stuff as “signal” and all the other crap as “noise”. So a high signal-to-noise ratio mean that the group or community was enjoyable and useful. If the ratio was low, then that meant it was mostly people cluttering up a space and not contributing anything good. Believe it or not, back in olde times most of us actually cared about adding only good, quality information to the places we congregated.

Today, however, even before current political events, the whole of the internet is full of noise. Oh, you can still find good stuff if you hunt for it, but often it gets drowned out by the crap. And often the crap just makes us all feel… crappy.

Most of our noise tends to show up on social media, where we put up with links and posts by friends who we care about, even if we don’t really care about the topic they’re discussing. So today, to make your life more serene, some filtering tools for social media.

Facebook Purity is a plugin for the desktop that allows users to filter pretty much every single thing that shows up on a Facebook page, from all the stuff in the sidebars to certain types of posts. If you really don’t want to know that your Uncle Bob liked that post about the white supremacist, well you can filter that. Facebook Purity also offers a text-based filter, which means that all you have to do is add “Trump” to that box and any post that mentions the US president by name will not show up in your feed. Some stuff might still get through – it does not work on shared posts or posts where someone refers to him as “that asshole” instead of by your filtering term, but it does a great job of clearing out the majority of stuff you don’t want to see. Sadly this plug-in only works on desktops, and not on mobile devices. For my own sanity, I’ve deleted Facebook from my phone, but I totally get how that can be the hardest thing ever to actually do.

For Twitter, I am a huge fan of the app Twitteriffic. This one is mobile only, and not desktop, but it also allows users to “muffle” tweets based on user name, hashtag or text. Muffled tweets show up in your feed with minimal info, typically user plus the topic/user/hashtag you’ve muffled, which allows you to open that post or ignore it.

Don’t forget that muting on Twitter or unfollowing on Facebook are also great ways to take a break from someone without removing them completely, or without them knowing that you just can’t deal with their shit at the moment.

Do not feel obligated to read all the stuff in your social media feeds, especially if it stresses you out. You are absolutely allowed to filter, cull or even take a complete break if you feel the need.

And finally, please consider using good Netiquette – if you are writing or sharing posts on social media about things like Trump, make sure you’re using common keywords (“Donald Trump” instead of “Lord Dampnuts” for instance…) or hashtags to make it easier for others to filter out those posts if they don’t want to see them, while still being able to read the other, non-triggering stuff that you’re posting.

The Introvert’s Guide to Killing Media Clutter

door sign

How much media clutter do you experience each day? A few months back, that old guesstimate that we each see around 5000 pieces of advertising each day was revised to be around 300, which makes more sense but is still way too much. Turns out our brains only absorb about half of that… but what if you could make your life almost “media clutter” free?

As a curmudgeonly introvert, I don’t want to see ads, especially for stuff I have no interest in. I don’t want to deal with flyers, catalogues or emails with suggestions of stuff I might like. I know what I like, thanks, and can usually use the old Googlebox to find it for myself.

Eradicating media clutter not only has environmental benefits, but with so much less “noise” coming in, it allows for a more tranquil life.

Working from home, the only time I now encounter advertising I have not intentionally sought out is when I’m on the street (billboards, bus shelters) or when I ride transit. I love, love, love not being inundated with ads for crap I don’t want or need. Here’s how I did it…

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Me, I Disconnect From You

My husband is a huge Louis C. K. fan. When it was announced that C.K. would headline the JFL42 Festival taking place in Toronto in September, Greg’s brain near exploded with glee. More so when it was announced that another major act would be comedian Patton Oswald. But then we started looking at the ticketing system. Besides a whole bar code thing that prevents people from selling or passing on tickets to events if they can’t use them, it turns out that the only way to order tickets to JFL42 was via Facebook.

Too bad for me then that I’ve deactivated my Facebook account and have no plans at present to use it again.

I get that the festival organizers are trying to be hip or wired in or something, but the whole thing is incredibly illogical, particularly the part requiring attendees to use a particular social media platform to take part.

Over the past few months, while I’ve still been online in some capacity and still check a pared down Twitter feed every day, I’ve been using social media a lot less. At first, this was so that I could concentrate on getting my book written. Most of my previous writing gigs had required that I be tuned in to the local restaurant scene and it was actually a relief to stop worrying about who was opening what where, and which chefs were leaving to open their own businesses, etc.

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Lucky Dip – Thursday, October 13th, 2011

Has science found a way to turn off food allergies? Even more interesting to me is the similarity/comparison  to multiple sclerosis. I have a friend who swears that her MS gets worse when she’s suffering from food allergies – she literally can’t walk if she eats wheat. Really intrigued to see where this goes. [MSNBC: Vitals]

Is the now-ubiquitous Italian trattoria replacing the doughnut shop and pub? [The Grid]

Are we pushing the holidays or is everybody just excited to find out what “pine sugar” really tastes like? Heston Blumenthal’s mince pies go on sale in the UK this week. Last year they were fighting in the aisles and selling them at a 300% mark-up on eBay. [Guardian]

The pizza in a cone thing is not new – but it’s new to Toronto. The Mad Italian offers it at both Toronto locations. [Toronto Star]

8 ways to cut your food waste. [Culinate]

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The High School Reunion

A friend sent me a link to photos of my high school reunion last year. I didn’t attend, didn’t even know about it until months after the fact, but it’s still left me feeling very uneasy and odd. I’m not sure I would have attended, to tell the truth, even if I had known.

I was a bit of an outcast in high school; the fat girl, the punk freak. I didn’t really fit in anywhere, and spent more time hanging out with friends from another local high school than I did my own. The day they handed me that diploma was the last I saw of my high school friends. When I got on a plane a year later and moved a thousand miles away, that was pretty much the last I heard from anyone.

Twenty years later, Facebook has allowed people to find each other very easily and I’ve been in contact with a couple of people who I genuinely liked back then. It’s been fun to reconnect, learn about each others’ lives and make plans to meet up the next time I’m home.

But these were the few people I liked and trusted. I’m not sure how I feel about my own personal “mean girls”.

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