See also "I Hate the News" by Aaron Swartz http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
I think the book "It's not news, it's FARK" is the best thing that Drew Curtis has ever done.
News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
111–120 of 245 posts
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#112so, you said, I should give up Hacker News?
I'd say yes, but I'm not entirely sure. I ditched TV, apart from TV news, then the TV altogether, then mainstream news on the net. I moved to digg, I moved off digg. For the last two years I read hacker news, and occasional newspaper I can get my hands on (I'm not buying them though, I firmly believe that not funding your addiction is the first step to limiting or even shedding your addiction).
I read hacker news for almost two years now. The problem is that I can't dismiss hacker news as easily as I did with all the other news sources because I strongly suspect I'm learning some valuable things here. Sure, 90% is just amusement, 9% has some conversational value but I'm afraid 1% is actually enriching for me and I'm afraid where could I get this if I ditch HN.
Best (sort-of) news addiction I had so far was being addicted to stackoverflow. Helping strangers with their problems as fast as I can was really good for me. Unfortunately I got the job, then I lost the job. That messed my mind somehow and now stackoverflow seems like too much work.
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#113The world is a dangerous place. There is no way around it: it's always been this way. Whether it is a North Korea crisis, something burning in the Middle East, or our national debt, the news can bring you to the reality of danger, of war, of looming financial crisis. Sure, by not reading it, you can retrieve yourself to a happy place in San Carlos or Palo Alto, but the danger still irks there, and it is not going awa…
Mass media focus on drama not in information; so your emotions are appealed more than rational thoughts. You can't do nothing about the North Korea crisis even if you watch the news, that's a "Reality check".
That's right, jQueryIsAwesome, jQuery is awesome in Palo Alto.
And you can do nothing about North Korea. And you don't care about North Korea, because the only thing you care about is Palo Alto, its organic restaurants, its girls, and, of course, jQuery.
But NK isn't going away. And you, American kids, can stick your heads in Palo Alto sand, and assume that all is good, and by not knowing what's out there, you will make yourself happier.
Happy happy joy joy!
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#114News used to be bad for me when I was a young kid in my teens. It used to depress me. Now that I'm in my thirties I've become desensitized and pretty much nothing bothers me. News is only bad for you if you let it affect you.
I'd say becoming desensitized is a problem in itself.
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm amazed to see an article trying to inform me that, indeed, ignorance is bliss. While I think people should watch their garbage intake, I'd certainly not encourage tuning out world events any more than I'd encourage running with both earbuds in. In either case one is likely to be taken off guard.
That's not what it says at all. What it says is that there are really big, deep, important, and world-changing stories happening all around us, but you won't get them from what passes for news. What you will get is a fragmentary sugar-high that actually damages your ability to grasp more meaningful accounts of the world. That is to say, the kind of news this story refers to (and which the Guardian sees itself as bein…
I see what you're saying... It's just that the author says "news" when he means "the stuff called news that isn't news" which is hard to talk about without sounding like a hypocrite; he describes the phenomena - factoids - for example, but is ultimately participating in the proliferation of exactly the type of water-cooler/factoid/self-help pseudo-intellectual article that he's deriding. His article is filler in the "Media" section on guardiannews.com. The author might have said "too much junk 'news' makes people unhappy" and I'd have promptly carried on ignoring those types of articles. :)
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#116This article irks me. Although most "news" has regressed into banal link bait just plain yellow journalism, and the notion of the "news organization" has undergone an inexorable transition towards the likes of Buzzfeed the the Huffington Post, it's absurd to assert that all news is worthless. First, his point that no news can be of value to one's personal situation or decision-making is false. News has impacted my li…
I think the best counter to the faff in this article is simply: Talk to someone who watches the news. Then talk to someone who doesn't. Even if nothing else, watching the news is at least indicative of an interest in the world beyond arms'-length. Besides, there's a world of difference between "read the news being aware that the news-maker has an agenda" and "ignore the news entirely".
I totally agree with what you said, some of my coworkers are blissfully ignorant to anything that happens beyond their household and talking to them feels almost like talking to a child. Sometimes it even gives me a sense of superiority when I see I am way more "prepared" than them.
Having said that, I feel exhausted from news. Specially link bait or biased media. Almost like I have a burnout of BS and I am becoming very skeptical from almost all news source. Example, started watching CNN ditched in favor of BBC then stopped BBC in favor of Al Jazeera then... You get the point.
I must say that I have an urge that I keep coming back to check the news, every so often, to satiate this weird need to staying informed. But if I could, talking almost like an addicted person here, I would totally stop reading all this "crap".
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Editing the hosts file works, but then you can't visit those sites at all. Consider doing that for a week (or however long) and see if your habit changes. I've found that sense of effortlessness declines after such a break.
One of my "new year resolution" this year was to block news sites on my /etc/hosts. Almost 5 months in and I'm not going back. The next step is blocking reddit.
and HN?
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#118I've come to a similar conclusion. Because news emphasizes the dramatic over the contextual, they're always providing me poor information in an even poorer context. That's just the way the business works. I've done something weird, though: I switched to plaintext commentary. So each day I scan my personal news site, http://newspaper23.com . It only does commentary. I find that by scanning the titles I can see what ne…
Your argument rests on the flawed premise that the reader is a passive fool waiting to be spoon-fed their morning panic ration. An article may be the top story of the day, but that doesn't mean it is important or relevant to me. Clearly there is a "news cycle" and every day there must be some top story. The reader is not compelled to pay heed. The discriminating reader does not perceive a newspaper to be some distill…
We have a real problem if the masochistic few who have historically embraced hard questions by parsing original sources either choose not to or never discover their interest when regularly presented with an easy way out. Can the self-interested pursuit of real knowledge & understanding exist in a world of algorithmically generated bite-sized morsels?
I believe it can. People have bemoaned society's advancements negatively impacting the dissemination of information to a thoughtful populace since before paper boys shouted headlines from corners. It happened with radio, it happened with television, it happened with dotcom portals.
Smart people aren't so easily distracted from learning.
The pain of manual research means most people don't bother to do it. Improved indexers, aggregators, and summarizers improve access to those with attention which only affords the surface.
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#119This article irks me. Although most "news" has regressed into banal link bait just plain yellow journalism, and the notion of the "news organization" has undergone an inexorable transition towards the likes of Buzzfeed the the Huffington Post, it's absurd to assert that all news is worthless. First, his point that no news can be of value to one's personal situation or decision-making is false. News has impacted my li…
I looked into this and experimented with it a while back. My conclusion was that:
a. If something is actually important to me, I will find out about it whether I read the news or not.
b. Keeping in mind (a), any news that I don't hear about through other channels is not urgent.
c. A quick "news" piece will have almost no depth or context that could actually give the story relevance. And will very often just be outright wrong.
My conclusion from these three observations was that I should read news magazines like the new yorker, forbes, etc instead of reading the nytimes. With a goal of trying to find a reasonable mix of biases so that I don't get too closed off to different points of view.
If the story is actually important, yet I didn't hear about it from friends, it won't matter that they spent a month investigating it and writing it up before publishing it.
And strangely, facebook becomes much more useful when thought of as a news aggregator. It will of course have a tendency to produce a bubble, but I certainly found out about Aaron Swartz on facebook far before I saw it anywhere else.
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Al Jazeera and BBC are both solidly on the left. I'm not disputing the quality of their reporting or the value of exposing oneself to their reporting, but you're fooling yourself if you think they're neutral.
"reality has a left-wing bias" The ABC (Australian version) gets comments that it's heavily left-wing, yet they have their own internal metrics that watch for evenness of opinion, and these have to match up with an external auditor. Of course no-one can be neutral about a subjective topic, but it's interesting that those news organisations with strong reputations for quality general-news reporting are always seen as…
Like The Economist?
Are the ABC's internal metric's available? What about the audits?
Their selection of journalists on current affairs shows is interesting though. Chris Uhlman's wife is an ALP MP, Barrie Cassidy was a Hawke staffer, Maxine McKew became an ALP member, Kerry O'Brien was a Whitlam staffer. It's almost like there is a pattern....