Obligatory Charlie Brooker "How To Report The News" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtGSXMuWMR4
News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
151–160 of 245 posts
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#152[deleted]
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the article (written in 2006), Aaron Swartz wrote: "This seems to be true, but the curious thing is that I’m never involved. The government commits a crime, the New York Times prints it on the front page, the people on the cable chat shows foam at the mouth about it, the government apologizes and commits the crime more subtly. It’s a valuable system — I certainly support the government being more subtle about comm…
Seriously? Is that what happened? Completely unprovoked, the government did something bad? I kinda read that he broke the law and the government were prosecuting him for it.
The article argues in large part that news reporting generally lacks context and depth. You just left a comment that perfectly illustrates why this is problematic.
Oh the irony.
If you care: What's at issue in the Aaron Swartz case is the proportionality of the government response to the infraction. Whether he committed a crime (or not) is largely a moot point.
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#154The author should have added a TL;DR "ignorance is bliss" at the top.
Slightly more subtle - TL;DR: news does nothing to cure you of ignorance, so avoid the aggravation of news
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#155I'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…
[deleted]
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#156I'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…
Citizens surrender their control of information flow when they accept mandatory public education and learn to accept a regimented doses of "knowledge" by schedule. The alternatives are to become "knowledge" rebels, which often means not just bucking the establishment, but one's peer groups as well, whom you can't escape in mandatory educational institutions.
Real education begins when mandatory learning ends.
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#157I'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…
[deleted]
Fri 12th April?
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 outrig…
How do you test a) ? How do you know what you don't know? :) It seems like you're saying that something is not important if you do not find out about it..
You test a) by following the news and making a note of what pieces are "important" and then whether or not you hear about them via other sources too.
Re: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
#159Heroin is supposed to make you happy, if that's the goal. Being an ignorant member of society is a recipe for personal and societal disaster. How many people have taken the time to define news? Not in terms of what makes one thing more interesting than others, but at the simplest level: what is news? You can't ask for more substance until you define what the substance you are after is. Once you've defined it, you wil…
Have you tried Heroin? :)