Whole new worlds
Published October 13, 2024
Firefox on Android has a feature where it shows you “Thought-provoking stories” that come from Pocket (which is owned by Mozilla, maker of Firefox). These aren’t sponsored links or ads; they’re simply popular stories that people have bookmarked lately. You can choose which categories to show, and I usually pick science and/or technology.
What’s interesting to me is that some of these stories come from online magazines that I’ve never heard of, but, once I explore them, I realize are clearly popular and have been around a while. They’re typically well-designed and (it seems) well-funded, judging by the fact that they seem to have staff writers and an editorial staff. (And no, they aren’t AI-written.)
It’s like finding a whole other world I never knew existed. It’s not stumbling upon some weird, dark corner of the Internet — these are (for want of a better word) legitimate sites created and written by professionals with, I have to assume, some kind of office, editorial meetings, maybe even a staff break room with doughnuts someone brought in that day. (Sure, they might be entirely virtual, but let me have my fantasy.)
If I mentioned any by name (Hakai magazine)(Fatherly (“the leading digital media brand for dads”), I suspect some people would say, “Oh, sure, I read that all the time,” but certainly there are other, brightly lit corners of the Net that they haven’t found. It’s a big virtual world.
It makes me realize how … siloed I am. I like to think I read a lot of sources with a lot of points of view, but in reality there’s so much more to explore.
