The following passage from Slate’s “The Year In Push Alerts” touched a nerve with me:

As a computer programmer, White said, he gets frequent 30-second breaks while the software he’s working on is loading, rendering, and searching—and during those tiny intervals he feels helplessly drawn to the news. “[I’ll see a] tweet about some bizarre behavior… Look at the article. Click through to another article. Post that on Twitter. Get a like. Look at that person’s feed. See another take on how awful Trump is. Click on it. Feel guilty. Try to focus on work. Someone walks into my office and says, ‘Can you believe that Gorsuch says …’ And so on.” During the first few months of the administration, White said, he was losing approximately half of his work time falling down these miserable holes.

For me, this pattern started to take hold during the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote and I’ve had to work hard to break out of it. It’s part of the reason why I stopped being a smartphone person and took a step back from Twitter.

Oh yes, mentioning Twitter reminds me of this thing I saw about Twitter, on Twitter. It’s depressingly accurate and makes me even more keen to run screaming from the noisy blue bird:

“How a day on British Twitter works”, by @TechnicallyRon. Click for full version