Do you ever "recuse" yourself from activities involving younger people?

In this age of deluge of information, it is probably required to ignore a large amount of it, and to be your own best "Editor" or "filter" on what you do and do not consume on a daily basis. This is nothing new. But before information just flooded at you free, the "recusal" took the form of not subscribing to magazines or newspapers, so kind of an opt-in system. Now we have much more of an opt-out system, where information sources are all combeting to shove information at you in a variety of forms regardless of your active choice to see it or not.

Way back 20 years or so ago the "Choice" was to start participating in the internet at all, but that choice is no longer a choice at all, it's a default.

So I could see why you guys would need to "recuse," but we old people would just call it using the same sorts of skills we always had in a new way -- pruning sources and choosing not to consume certain sources.

It's tougher now than ever -- there's more and more sources coming up with more and more shitty streams and feeds of the same shit. And clickbait is proven to work -- people absolutely do click on the most inflammatory, most "fake" news out there. So the media companies keep providing it.

Memes, personal opinion here only, suck. They are anathema to literate debate. They are basically an illustrated political statement, quite often wrong, quite often over-simplified, quite often not designed to elicit anything but trolling anger.

If it were up to me, and of course it's not, you would not be able to post a meme without it being flagged as such. But that kind of control of content is light years behind being able to be rolled out onto today's wide open anything goes internet. And nor is it likely to ever be.

/r/AskOldPeople Thread