Harold Edgerton: Hammer Breaking Glass (1933)

"This future sure seems unduly fragmented."

I find myself almost exclusively turning to social media for my BreakingNews. I haven’t tuned into a local television news broadcast in nearly five years. I don’t have access to CNN, Fox, or MS-Now on TV, or even access to the network television news broadcasts. I will, on occasion, still tune into NPR if I’m near a radio when news breaks, but I have been increasingly bee-lining to my social media feeds when I catch a whiff of something important occurring. I most often get those whiffs from my social media feeds, too, though I’ve grown increasingly cautious. The proliferation of deepfakes there means that I often check the credibility of the URL behind whatever seems to be breaking. I, sadly, often find the questioned URL carrying the BreakingNews to be broken.

The news itself seems broken by social media. It has spread the reporting to almost exclusively feature people who clearly never received any sort of training as journalists. They almost universally struggle to get to their point. I often find myself impatiently waiting through several long minutes of self-promotion (”Be sure to subscribe!”) and largely unnecessary introduction (”We’re the most watched site on YouTube this week!”) before encountering anything resembling a lede. To say these tend to be buried amounts to a gross understatement. They seem inundated. These exist as requiem to the once familiar who, what, when, where, and why. The reportage tends to be decidedly one-sided, partisan, especially anything insisting that insists it represents a fair and balanced perspective. Most social media reporters shamelessly lie. It’s like entering a store where the shelves are organized by the order of the inventory’s arrival: Last In, First Out.

Background’s easy to access but difficult to conclude from, for they amount to preserved glimpses absent any clarifying analysis. Everything seems to have been created for some specific, immediate purpose, as if reporting were primarily about classifying. The narrowing perspective tends to amplify specific issues at the price of any broader context. I could say that most social media news gets presented as if its context was either unbelievably narrow or simply didn’t matter, neither of which was very likely the case. The sense of disconnection, something that real reporting might reduce, seems amplified by social media reportage. The amateurs and well-intended color commentators clearly aren’t generally up to the job they’ve chosen for themselves. If you need understanding, tune in later that evening, well after the BreakingNews has finished shattering.

I have gratefully not yet acquired the podcast habit. I find their pace off-putting. If BreakingNews seems pedantic, podcasts seem downright Titanic, oversized, and overblown. They typically feature someone famous for being famous, and many followers, because they have so many followers, hardly an authoritative voice among them. They often pretend to be elder statesmen, though their assertions seem especially flimsy, if only due to their age. Nobody’s anybody’s elder anything when they’re under thirty.

It seems strange how immediate BreakingNews doesn’t seem on social media. No queue exists to segregate the breaking from the previously broken, so it feels terribly frustrating when tracking down such stories. It seems as if a fuse is burning toward igniting a great explosion, but I’m distracted trying to tie my shoes. I might have a few dozen choices from the search I made when I heard the first inkling, each uniquely useless in the context of those first tense minutes. I’d gladly settle for one semi-reliable voice, a familiar Walter Cronkite to clue me in, even though I would know he was in some studio far away from the source of the BreakingNews. He could deliver such information apparently unbroken, as a seemingly seamless interpretation of stuff I struggle to cobble together from my vastly better-resourced social media. This future sure seems unduly fragmented.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Unscrolling, #PureSchmaltz