Crikey, digital ghettos, Mark Day, a call to ranters of Australia, and a warning about 666 ...

Every so often, a poignant cry rends the air on loon pond.

Today it comes from Crikey, striking a valiant Mark Day pose in despair at this newfangled digital age, as it mourns the way we're All locked away in our digital ghettoes:

... with the decline of the mainstream media, little lamented by any except unemployed journalists, we’re also losing something social media cannot provide. As media users fragment into an ever-proliferating range of platforms in which they entirely control who they see and hear and what they read, the risk of us locking ourselves into digital ghettos increases.

Does it? How is the risk on the intertubes any higher than the risk of someone confining themselves to the one paper for many years, and thereby imbibing more Piers Akerman than the National Health Standards deem appropriate. There's only so much mercury the system will tolerate, and you're better off getting that by eating swordfish.

My father read the Daily Mirror for years, wouldn't read the broadsheets, and for some mysterious ideological reason, refused to contemplate either the Daily Telegraph or The Sun. Call it what you will, but I'd call it a tabloid ghetto, with the public library providing the bran to help digest the fairy floss.

I suppose if you grew up in a relatively affluent household you might have had Jeeves bring you a full range of papers for a read over the eggs, jam and toast, but only misty eyed journalists dream of this mythical valhalla.

Perhaps that's why Crikey is determined to set a tone of melancholy and despair.

Mass media, for all its many faults, provided a common space in which differing, frequently hostile ideas could compete. But increasingly, our media platforms allow us to filter out what we don’t want to hear. The rigour of considering a viewpoint with which ones disagrees  — even if only to reject it  — and even the patience of simply hearing someone out, are not skills that Twitter or other social media encourage.

Ah yes, the tabloids of yesterday, so wide ranging in their diversity of views that I'm still astonished at their cultivated air. I can imagine Sir Frank Packer shouting at his editorial team to "give them what they want, and what they want is a diversity of opinions and hostile ideas which happen to reflect my own ideas". And when some foolish possum dared to speak up, and suggest they run diverse opinions - like a vote for Labor is a vote for good government for the workers - shouting at them that he's had the patience to hear them out, and now they'd just better bloody do what he wants, before he boots them out.

There's always a golden age for the elderly, and strangely it never happens when the old contemplate the golden age in which the young are living, because the young don't realize it either, until they get older and brood about the golden age, when Twitter and social media encouraged a wonderful new world of digital interaction and social bonding, unlike the current young who somehow manage to communicate in emoticons which are incomprehensible to the elderly who relied on the Shakespearian range provided by Twitter.

So it goes, and so sadly does it go for a mournful Crikey:

Whether that’s healthy for our increasingly digital democracy isn’t at all clear.

Oh yes, bring back the tabloids, and while we're at it, why not stage World War 111, in memory of the good old days of social bonding over newspapers during World War 11.

But I came to wonder if somehow I'd been hasty, so that's when I decided it was time for this site to promote ideas which might promote hostility, but which also might help explain why fundamentalist Christians are by far the best to turn to when seeking insights about climate change and the impending end of the world.

Some mad anonymous pamphleteer went around the inner suburb of Newtown, bombing the letter boxes of students, infidels, chardonnay sippers, latte drinkers, music lovers, goths, emos, punks, tattoed deviants, and for a week afterwards, the street was littered with refuse. So I picked one up, and here's just a sampling of its crucial message:

Is this the right time to mention that I once had a car with a numberplate which included the magical 666, and even now my driver's license includes those magic figures all a row? Mebbe not. Sorry to rudely interrupt, carry on:
See, we've made Crikey happy by being open to ideas, and demonstrating how we refuse to filter, so anxious are we to hear alternative ideas we don't want to hear.

Oh and Mark Day? This week he's as happy as a pig in clover as he uses his blog to beguile punters to help out: Ranters of Australia send us your fun-filled yarns.

So this is a call to arms, a call for yarns. I know from the feedback I’ve been receiving for more than a decade that a lot of old practitioners read this column. Now I ask: tell us your stories - the bizarre, the silly, the stuff-ups, the literals and the inspired tradecraft from the days when reporters roamed the streets, drank in bars with coppers and crims, or crawled under trams to ask pedestrian casualties if it was their birthday.

Email your contributions direct to Revel at Ranters or to me at the addresses below. We’ll post them on the Gentlemen Ranters site and - who knows? - one day one of us might cobble the best of them together for a book we’ll call Wild Men II.

Silly old goose, thinking the social media is a source of fun and interaction, when he needs to imbibe a little bit more of that gloomy emo goth Crikey introspection.

Oh it's nostalgia week in the media, but we're doomed, I tells ya, Pinky and the Brain, and once more it's all the fault of the full to overflowing, plastic brain warping intertubes.