Can we talk anymore?

I hope so. I'm at a desk after all.

I've got the suit on kind of. No pronouns. Unless you like that, in which case they're whatever ones you like the most.

In fact, let's make me a real authority.

All right. Hi.

Can we even talk?

Is that even possible anymore?

24-hour cable news and its hyper-partisanization has seeped into all aspects of the media and internet,

and more importantly, social media, which brings on a whole new set of communication

problems like parasycial relationships, algorithms chasing our attention and heightening

negative emotions, bad actors and partisan political operatives, isolation and atomization,

and tribalism exacerbated by the pandemic, bots from all kinds of places for all kinds of reasons.

Misinformation from bots and humans alike. Stories being forgotten too quickly. The Boring

culture war. All the polarization and like it or not, a lot of our representatives, officials,

media, and billionaires do discourse on specifically Twitter.

And then one of those billionaires bought it and created a monetary incentive for posting

and getting attention. The most attention gets you more money, you see. That'll fix it. Oh,

also another of those Twitter billionaires is the president and has his own social media site he also communicates on.

So, can we even, like, talk to each other effectively about anything, let alone a tragedy?

I don't know.

So, what's in the news? About three weeks ago from when this episode comes out, a teen boy in Colorado shot two classmates before killing himself. The shooter had

been radicalized online by white supremacist propaganda, which is so often the case.

...