something seems off to me when I see my 'online spaces' explode with stuff related to Netflix or Apple Updates etc. I'm not sure what...→[More:]

(let me begin by saying that yes, I get that whatever's going in online chatter etc is not that important and I can just ignore it when needed... but while we're "in-world", we can discuss its conventions...)

I can't quite get a handle on it or articulate it really. The usual thing to do if a bunch of people are talking about something you don't want to hear that much about is to just un-plug; to unfollow them or (if this is face-to-face) not hang out with them so much and so on. People have communities of interest and demographics and that's how it is.

Here it's different though because it's people I don't necessarily want to stop paying attention to; it's just that they're part of a cascade of earnestness around a topic, but when they're not, they're all sorts of people in all sorts of industries and with different personal profiles.

Maybe it's just about me not being an in-group with their concerns (I'm not all up on the whole buying experience from Apple store and haven't upgraded my iphone hardware in years, etc.); if I was then I'd just be chiming in too. "Here's my latest opinion on this thing everyone's on about!" But it's "them" instead of "us" cause I'm not interested.

It's not even that I'm mad at the materialist or bourgouis aspect of people engrossed with these things cause I'm often talking about things significantly more expensive, it's all good

I dunno... [deep personal mode on] I've never been all that predisposed to getting caught up in things that are "happening now!" like holidays and festivals, etc., and these days I'm trying to get more tuned into that sort of thing... when there's like a natural disaster or big news cycle I'm often disconnected from it in the sense that, it's not that I don't care/have an opinion on it, I just don't feel like doing a 'performance of engagement'--there's a protest, let me go!--there's a show, I have to catch this!--etc...but these days I sometimes force myself just do it as a social participant... talk about here's the news about this earthquake.. did you hear about X... and as I get more engaged in social media it's also something I sometimes ponder doing... like should I mention this just cause it's a big deal right now... I guess there's a part of me that really recoils from this sort of 'topic cascade'