Changing how I use the Internet reconnected me to my mother tongue
I don't really know how and where to start this post because it's actually two and a half post combined. Let me explain: a few days ago I had this idea to write about how I feel about the way a lot of Romanian news sites handle the news and why I think it's stupid; today I was thinking about the fact that I used to hate reading things in Romanian and now I realize why. I realized that these two things are very interconnected and I should talk about them together. Those are the two main ideas of the post. The 0.5 idea is that I've been meaning to write an update to the post where I explained how I intended to use the Internet from now on, which would actually put my thoughts in context so I decided that this too should be in the same text... so I guess I'll start with that.
Update on my dumb smartphone
Back in January I talked at length about how I don't hate the fact that I'm on my phone a lot but I hate how I use it. I lamented the excitement I used to feel for technology back when the Internet was just a series of tubes filled with cats and dreams and opening messenger on my phone with BUTTONS felt like witchcraft. And I detailed how I started changing the way I use it and my devices in order to achieve what I used to dream the Internet will become. In short: I deleted a bunch of apps and started using the website versions of them through the phone's browser. Since then I changed it to Firefox because I like it more. I put the microSD card I have in my phone to good use and filled it with mp3s. My notes and calendar are in the Obsidian app now and the two newest additions are Antenna-Pod for podcasts and Capy Reader for the news. This way I don't have to rely on Facebook's fickle algorithm to not live under a rock. I put all my eBooks on my old as fuck tablet and I mostly keep my laptop offline unless I want to use the Interwebz. And it's going great! I love it. I've been more informed and more entertained with minimal doom scrolling. When I want news I go to my news app, when I want something interesting to read I go to my Firefox collections, I have one for blogs and one for magazines and one for webcomics. If I need to go to Facebook or Instagram, and sometimes I do cause there are businesses that don't have a website outside of their social pages, I just use the browser.
The Thesaurus Olympics a.k.a. News Sites
I follow a good mix of news sites on my RSS app. I have some local, regional and national sites in Romanian and a few international ones in English. Generally news sites are terrible. Between biases and clickbait titles, I did my best to curate a decent mostly objective list. That doesn't mean it's without issues. But I'll get to that in a bit.
After a few weeks of reading my news in what's basically a self curated morning newspaper I started to slowly realize how fucked up thing are. And I don't mean how fucked up that actual World events are, that's whole different can of worms. But I mean the news outlets themselves. On one hand you have the propaganda and fake news kinda publications that seem to be news from a different dimension and on the other hand there's the more objective news sites that are trying to spice up their texts the same way a highschooler will try to write a school paper, by overusing the thesaurus.
And I get it. Objective news can be a little bland. You basically write a bit of data - a location, event, time, people involved, consequences of that event and if you're lucky maybe you get a quote or two. But there's not much to say, especially when it comes to daily political happenings. It's just "person said this a this press thing" and that's the whole article. It's not a bad thing that it's like that. It's concise and clear communication. But because we live in the world that we live in these websites need to compete with the more engaging ragebait fake news that does much better on algorithms and also get enough clicks to satisfy the almighty monetization ads. Here's a list of things I noticed they do:
- clickbait headlines - ok, fair. It works for social media and as long as they don't imply something outlandish they're mostly harmless. A little bit annoying but oh well.
- rephrasing the same two paragraphs several times. I don't see ads in my RSS app but I'm willing to bet that in between each paragraph there's an ad. This is extremely annoying and time consuming and sometimes even confusing. Sometimes the reiterations of the paagraphs seem a bit contradictory to the first part of the text, some even smell of confused robot rephrasing prompts.
- buzzwords. So many buzzwords. There are two kinds: one is the usual "slave to the SEO" they use for obvious reasons. The other is the fad words or even signature words. One of the local sites calls everything "hallucinant" - stupid pollical statement: "hallucinant statement"; celebrity has a new outfit: "hallucinant fashion sense"; new restaurant in town "hallucinant menu"; drunks got in fight over something stupid and got arrested "hallucinant event". I honestly keep wanting to send them an email and ask them what they're on. I don't think it's normal to hallucinate all day every day. And then there's the fad - some person of the moment uses a big word to express a small idea and and suddenly everyone checks their dictionaries to see what the fuck it means and then uses it with every opportunity for the next two weeks.
- one of them came clean about using AI to write everything in the spirit of speed. Which is something that I suspected because some of it didn't make any sense. But I don't think it's so much about speed as is about laziness and rephrasing other articles from other sites while avoiding the whole "you stole my text!' issue. It's not just that it's a shitty practice and impacts their credibility (I unfollowed them) but a lot of times it creates confusion and are hard to read.
- the worst of the worst are opinion pieces. Now let me make this clear, I'm not complaining that they exists, I actually like them, I read them weather I agree or don't and I appreciate that these are usually clearly marked as an opinion and not as news or facts. That's great and I think it's a healthy thing to read. What I'm complaining is the language some use. They dust off their thesaurus and change every word they can to make the text seem more elevated. They try to put on an air of "smart guy with a pipe in an armchair waxes poetically about the state of the World". Sometimes these things are so hard to read it just feels like the Univers Transvers video (Romanians will pretty much know what I mean, for foreigners: watch it, I know you can't understand it, neither do we, but it's in Romanian). I usually have to reread some paragraphs several times to figure out what they were trying to say.
These things together make the news really off-putting, hard to read and makes the reader feel patronized. So no wonder that the more engaging and more easily digestible websites get more readers. This I think is part of the reason society gravitates towards strong opinions expressed in clear easy words that places the writer at eye level not above the reader.
The soulless language
For the longest time I couldn't connect to written Romanian. Not that I don't understand it or I don't know how to use it. I do. But here's what written Romanian was to me:
- old books we read in school that were written in a more archaic language and seemed far removed from the language as we use it now. I admit that I haven't read much Romanian literature outside of that, I mostly read in English. It's the language I connect to emotionally.
- book reports and papers that were expected to be written in a very formal way, again removed from the spoken language.
- textbooks and manuals. Not much to connect with either.
- early after school I worked for a small local physical newspaper where text space was limited so everything I wrote was short, concise and really to the point. Not that the news sites of today where they try to make the articles longer have more to connect with.
- college and editing papers for my next boss turned written Romanian into an academic language. Very formal, scientific and wooden.
- formal requests and legal documents. Doesn't need an explanation.
- social media didn't offer me much either, most of the Romanian articles that got to my screen were either news, fake news or the weirdest pseudoscience and pseudointellectual blogs that crafted their language to take on the formal tones of academia and law.
Honest emotional content, fantasy, rabbitholes and actual engaging discourse about life, Universe and everything were always English for me. Never in Romanian. It got so far that I feel weird having to text people in Romanian. I feel I come across rigid or rude or weird. I don't know how to express myself in an authentic honest way in written Romanian. I just don't connect with it. How could I, it's always been a cold utilitarian language for me, even in art, always pompous or archaic.
When I started charging how I use the Internet I split my reading into sections: the news, as I said, is in RSS app, books live on my tablet. On my phone I have a few link collection in my browser - Blogs and Magazines. I never expected to add any Romanian websites there cause I don't read in Romanian for fun.. except that now I do. In the absence of a feed shoving everyone's random opinions about everything down my throat I had to go searching for it on google. I read some weird shit but I also got to some interesting articles that were so well written and fluid I didn't even notice I'm reading in Romanian. So I checked what other things they posted. From them I ended up on another online magazine they were citing and so on. And it only dawned on me this morning that I'm finally reading in Romanian for pleasure, curiosity and entertainment. Finally I connect with this language in a way I never connected before. I don't know if it's enough to make me blog in Romanian but we will see where this leads me. It's a whole new experience and I'm eager to discover more.
The changes I am making to how I function on the internet is bringing me to unexpected result. I'm not just less stressed by notifications and algorithms and a compulsion to scroll but I found actual enjoyment and connection instead of just consuming soulless content. This is just a confirmation that I'm doing something right.
I'll update you about this in a few months if there's anything else interesting.
P.S. I'm thinking of a monthly newsletter sent through Substack with updates of what I've been doing on here. But there's nothing thought through yet.
This post was migrated from my old Blogger blog.