To think of doing a group blog with political opinion and commentary seems so … year 2000, when one considers that we now engage with each other on Facebook and Twitter threads, and build our sense of national issues and current events out of our social media feeds. 

But the downside, one that we realize especially given the past four years of disinformation and government propaganda, is that there is no actual place we can go to that might function as a portal, not just of opinions, but more importantly of the more important issues of our time. There is no way to file these insta-reactions that social media cradles—hashtags can be hijacked, and paid posts, influencers, boosted opinion, and troll farms allow for those with money to takeover public (social media) opinion. 

There’s also just the fact that Facebook and Twitter has us easily distracted, and we jump from one issue to the next, as it is manufactured for us by the powers-that-be, government and otherwise. The commentariat is strong in this country, but it is at the mercy of whoever’s in control of issues that will be talked about, that will make it into mainstream media, that will be spent on to ensure social media noise. We’re quick to call out, even quicker to join in the fray. Never mind that much of what we tweet and put up as statuses also gets easily drowned in the next trending topic, the next hot issue.

Blogging, the kind that’s about writing, sitting down to flesh things out—seems like a way to address this state of affairs. In a group, it’s a way to get people who still want to discuss issues beyond 140 characters, to come together and disagree, debate, argue, agree on issues, in the way we used to—with civility and sense, facts and data. To some extent, this hopes to revive our belief in thoughtful critique, with no worries about trolls and mob rule. At its most basic, this is an effort at making sense of the current state of the nation, given the more urgent issues, no matter the social and mainstream media noise. 

Here’s hoping the decision to take things slow and take stock will provide us with a better sense of what to do next. At the very least, it will allow us to make sense of the disquiet in this time of uncertainty.***