But, as I look upon my foundation of what I do daily for discovery, it seems not all things are "new" but just "new to me" and then a total disconnection from what current trends, fads actually are.
So, HN, how do you do it?
I watch ads more than I did before, and I pay attention. I've found that if you want to keep up with western cultural development, ad culture must be given attention. And while ads can be annoying, they are also speaking for various archetypes within the societal organism of which we are all a part. To that degree they are a de facto intelligence source.
If you consider that the social bell curve also maps to the concept of rationality, this may even be more obvious. Painful for originalist or curmudgeonly techies maybe but yeah, we can be extremely irrational due to what we shut out.
(After spending a lot of time studying psychology, I don't place much importance on the idea that ads may be brainwashing me, and I've realized my own preferred life script, left on default settings, makes me my own worst brainwasher)
I also like to watch what my kids do, or say, when they are gaming or playing with other kids. It's weird, new, uncomfortable. But I try to think about implications. IMO memes, and novel conditions of memetic propagation, have sped up our information metabolism and you can make a case for meme-consumption bandwidth being an important gauge of various states of nutritional impoverishment. So to speak. This is really fascinating to me.
Learning about personality dynamics, I also found that there are different types of influencers who are worth paying attention to if you're in tech. One particular group overlaps with boring old tech very nicely, but they also yearn for societal status. For this reason they can be used as a sort of barometer--they're in tech, they're nerdy, but they're also kind of an early-warning radar for changes in society that they will be bringing into tech no matter who is resisting it. And they are much less frightening to pay attention to than others who are just into any new thing, any type of info-noise even, and could mostly really use the dopamine or other chemical stims at any given moment.
All of this has made the process more personal for me too, yet I base a lot of my own observations around acceptance and analysis rather than personal like/dislike, so I don't really look at favorite outlets / media sources as much anymore.
1. friends (we're constantly sharing links)
2. Social Media (HN, Reddit, following interesting people on Twitter)
3. academic papers
4. books
5. blogs