Endless Doom Scroller

The first time I really lost faith in the news was during the Oslo Peace Accord Talks, when CNN hosted a debate between a Palestinian and Israeli spokesperson. It seemed to me that it was quite a delicate political situation, and that simply reporting on it while leaving the top politicians to discuss would be better, but CNN really wanted a live TV debate about it. Well, it turned out that they'd specifically chosen polar opposites to discuss with one another. Now, since I've been working in media, I know the attendants weren't an accident. They are always carefully chosen. So if CNN really wanted to help the peace talks (they did after all speak highly of it), they would have invited other people, but I gather that would also have made for more "boring" TV. Obviously it was very "entertaining" to watch these two debaters have at each other, but it quickly turned so bad that the host had to intervene. During the debate I remember asking myself, "Is the CNN intentionally trying to disrupt the peace talks by inviting these two idiots to debate each other?" CNN's outreach is big and international, so this would be noticed both in Israel and Palestine. While possibly "entertaining" it did absolutely nothing to help the already bad situation. On the one side, you could perhaps claim that it's not in CNN's interest to "help" anyone (actually a certain level of conflict is what keeps most journalists fed), but in this instance they were clearly firing up people in the worst way, and thus disrupting important peace talks.

thats amazing! It's like the modern day on rails shooters!

I, too, came for the procedurally generated Doom levels and left disappointed

Right now there are people sitting in their doctor's office, hearing that they have a terminal disease. They only have a small amount of time to live.

This is about as negative as news can get, and it's been happening ever since there have been people and doctor's offices.

This is a horrible thing to have to bear, and many commit suicide or have a terrible time with the news. By and large, however, people go on with their lives, finding hope, arranging their affairs, and getting ready to both fight and enjoy the time they have left.

What they don't do, by and large, is have a continuous public meltdown, even though their life might look as bleak as is possible.

Negative news is great. What's needed and not provided is context. In a world of billions of people, with millions of people able to imagine and prove to various degrees that some horrible thing is about to happen, the amount of negatively-tainted news is for all intents and purposes infinite. It always has been. We've just had shitty communication systems.

People love to consume and share negative news. They love to slow down at the car wrecks to see if they can see bodies. They love to socially-gossip about how bad something might be and how so-and-so might be taking it or not. That's wired into our systems, probably as a survival behavior. Hominids who worry about lions tend not to get eaten by them, whether or not they live near any lions or not.

In this environment and evolutionary configuration, then, some sort of filtering mechanism is required so that the things we're hard-wired to do don't take over most of our life. To admit that isn't to want to live in a pollyannish world, it's simply to grow up and start consuming a media diet instead of a shitstorm firehose. There are real problems, yes. There always have been. To solve them requires precision, emotion-free discernment and slow progress. Most folks aren't getting any of that today. They're just getting the lizard brain stimulus over and over again. Because money.

How is "knowing" about the daily Corona virus data from around the world good for you? I get the basic idea: know to wear a mask, keep your distance, avoid groups of people in areas that aren't well ventilated. But what how does the number of deaths in some city you don't live in or near help you?

> People don't need to be experts about everything to become relatively well informed about many things, nor do they need to try to solve every problem at once.

My impression is that people are generally not well informed on anything. They know some factoids, they can repeat some headlines, but they don't understand half of it. And how could they? Even the journalists don't. Read the daily news about a topic you are an expert on and assume that they're as correct about everything else you're not an expert on.

Kony wasn't stopped by people knowing about him and his crimes and everybody spreading Kony 2012 and other Clicktivism. It doesn't change anything, other than your state of mind, which will be in a much, much worse condition.

If you do something, that's great. But it's obviously not connected to watching the news. Almost everybody watches the news, but almost nobody does anything.