The reverse of this is of course baby boomer generations who hate what the news has become (TV and Newspaper) yet slavishly consume it anyway, because of a lifetime habit.
Whenever I see an older relative frothing about some stupid article in the newspaper, or some pointless piece on TV - I just say 'why not switch it off? Why buy the paper anyway?'
I don't watch the news or read newspapers anymore, unless I happen to be in the vicinity of either by accident. If something important happens, I find out. Everyone does. Neighbours, people you work with - they're always delighted to share news you didn't hear about, and they don't drop in ads.
In the case of TV news and newspapers - lets say 6 hours a week glued to the talking heads and 4 hours a week in the paper = 500 hours a year - 12 24hr days in total, or 24 12hr days. All so they can sell your eyeballs to the highest bidder. Who wouldn't like 24 extra days time to do as they please with?
Stop paying attention to the media. You end up selling your time for pennies worth of benefit.
It's not that simple. Capturing people's attention is now a well studied science. The addiction is engineered. The people who are addicted(or "engaged") to their media streams whether social or main stream need the same sort of help any addict needs to kick the habit.
Since the addiction thus far hasn't caused lung cancer, driving accidents, violent behavior etc we can all continue to
1. make money of it and
2. tell the addicts to figure it out for themselves
News has been able to sell itself with the dictum that you "have to know what's happening!"
In reality, you really don't need to know what's happening around the world. Seriously. 95% of the news you read does not impact you in any meaningful way. Most of it is negative (which is the very nature of news) and too little of it concerns you in your immediate surroundings.
So yeah. You don't need to news. At least not 90% of what passes for news these days.
> News has been able to sell itself with the dictum that you "have to know what's happening!"
Yeah. A couple years ago when I was about 24, I decided I "should be more informed" because that's what adults do, so I bought a year subscription to Minneapolis's major newspaper with the goal of reading it mostly every day. I did for a while, but quickly realised that I didn't give a shit about almost anything in the paper. And worse, the things I read made me actively depressed. You know what? I don't care about how the war in Iraq is going. I don't care what some dumb conservative politician had to say about my friends and family. I don't care what crazy shit Russia or North Korea are getting up to. I don't care how many people are dying in a genocide on the other side of the world.
I guess maybe that makes me a bad person or something, but boy am I happier and more productive not knowing it. I canceled that subscription and I'm never looking back. "Keeping up with the news" was one of the worst things I ever did.
> You know what? I don't care about how the war in Iraq is going.
Well, that's the problem with being informed. If you don't get off your ass and protest (or do something one way or the other) -- either cognitive dissonance will drive you towards being a less caring person ("My government is killing civilians with hellfire missiles without declaring a war and I do nothing - it must be ok, then") -- or it makes you depressed. Or both.
I think the happy balance is to accept that you can only do/care about so much: engage locally and do something meaningful -- work on one or two issues that have global implications -- and not let the fact that you can't right all wrongs (or support all rights) get you down.
I don't care about how the war in Iraq is going.... I don't care how many people are dying in a genocide on the other side of the world.
I am sure this is not quite how you mean it, but to me this comes across as saying "if it doesn't affect my life, or my friends, then who cares." You should care about things that don't directly impact your life -- partly because you can make a difference in these things, sometimes, if you get involved.
Time to get out of the shire and see the world, bilbo.
> I am sure this is not quite how you mean it, but to me this comes across as saying "if it doesn't affect my life, or my friends, then who cares."
No, that sounds about right. I don't blame others for caring, or think they shouldn't care. In fact, I'm glad they do. But I don't.
> You should care about things that don't directly impact your life -- partly because you can make a difference in these things, sometimes, if you get involved.
Fixing the military industrial complex or some other country's fucked up government isn't really on my TODO list. For better or worse, it's not how I want to spend my life.
Aligning your circle of influence and circle of concern is the key to productivity and happiness.
Moral fashion is all the rage, but unless you are going to engage in the political process (properly, not just retweeting hashtags or sticking bumper stickers) then you're better off not bothering with it. People spend far too much energy on fashionable 'global' causes when there are a pile of local causes that need their help.
With a few exceptions (NYTimes, WSJ) newspapers tend to go just deep enough to distract, but not deep enough to inform. Read The Atlantic or Salon or other long-form stuff, read the more substantive news links off HN, but read.
Your initial instinct was a good one, reading well enriches you. Not reading makes you boring. And while I think it's profoundly worth it in the long run, learning about the world isn't necessarily supposed to make you happy.
I don't think selfishness is what the parent commenter is referring to. A great example of "news" not impacting me in any meaningful way was a week or two ago when there was breaking news about two alpacas on the loose. Meanwhile, net neutrality passed with a 300+ page document the public wasn't allowed to see at the time.
Right. The news that actually has an impact on the world is limited and usually accessible through non-news mediums (this site, Reddit, etc.). In fact, mainstream media often doesn't cover the news that really impacts you (the net-neutrality debate had pitiful coverage).
On the other hand, Obama not saluting some marines or Michel Bachmann saying some dumb thing has no real impact on the world, mine or others.
>In the case of TV news and newspapers - lets say 6 hours a week glued to the talking heads and 4 hours a week in the paper = 500 hours a year - 12 24hr days in total, or 24 12hr days. All so they can sell your eyeballs to the highest bidder. Who wouldn't like 24 extra days time to do as they please with?
The one part I can't believe is that 86% of people think they're "Usually [seeing] diverse opinions through social media".
The "filter bubble" is going to get worse and worse, it seems. Has anyone had any good experiences where a piece of information technology (forum, reddit, twitter, insta, etc) didn't encourage a filter bubble?
Well, one thing to consider is that the "filter bubble" is relative, to a degree. We are talking about news, for a mainstream audience. So, the old fashioned alternative is perhaps reading a single physical newspaper, watching 1 or 2 tv news shows and perhaps listening to one radio station, all of similar political bent. Compared to that, the variance of view points among my Facebook friends is likely still higher, as is, say the one among commenters of /r/worldnews or HN.
It is a bubble, of course. Most or all my Facebook friends are from the same age, same few countries and more or less similar economic background. Twitter and Reddit have their particular leanings and dogma. So, there is definitely a "filter bubble" compared to "the sum total of world opinions". But I'd still argue that there are more view points in that filter bubble than in the editorial voices within the press of a given country targeting a particular political affiliation. Perhaps not as much as there should be, given the possibilities, but still...
Very much agree. When I was a kid I watched one (and only one) of the three network news channels, read The New York Times + the local paper, and that was about it--this was before the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, so talk radio hadn't yet metastasized. It was hard to get alternative opinions in either direction, even if you wanted to.
Compared to that social media is a cornucopia/vomitorium of diversity. Alternate opinions are easy to find and sometimes hard to escape.
Managing to challenge ones preconceptions is always going to take work.
Also note that for someone getting their news from FOX News, the New York Times is a left-wing outlier. News is pretty terrible in Norway too, but I always feel like I'm in a sitcom whenever I visit the US/Canada. Where BBC and the Guardian appear as bastions against the establishment -- while they of course are very much mainstream.
On the other hand, I'm quite grateful to many of the Republican bloggers/commenters for offering their view on US politics -- it can be easy to forget that the US has a strong intellectual tradition, and while you'll find me agreeing with/quoting Chomsky or Klein more often than anyone on the other end -- there are quite a few voices on the right that have strong and interesting opinions on freedom, independence, commerce, curbing of federal powers etc.
Anyway, with HN being so dominated by the US in general, and Silicon Valley (including the part of SV that lives in NYC ;-) -- I find it can be quite a contrast to my other echo chambers...
I'm afraid I couldn't suggest anything similar that is more left leaning -- maybe https://zcomm.org/znet/ or http://monthlyreview.org/ (but I don't really follow either -- and they certainly can't compare in any meaningful way with hn).
Trolls are reinforcing the bubble by "proving" that everyone outside of it is purely an asshole with no intent to have a conversation, merely to insult and ridicule and try to cause people to leave the forum.
The problem is the labeling of them as trolls, is what I meant.
There is no such thing as trolls, that person you call a troll is making a joke or making a point and you're too far inside your own bubble to not call them an asshole.
There are people in the set of "others" who very much deserve harassment and ridicule--consider people actively working against the common good, like Scientologists or other online trolls or robber barons or city bosses.
I've always wondered if you could make some sort of website with an anti-bubble. Probably in the style of Twitter, since you'd want to minimize reliance on outside content of dubious provenance, but possibly in the style of reddit with a system that instead of just linking, there'd be some kind of automatic reputation system for the websites linked to. (For the reddit example, think hybrid link and self-post, where you link to a item and then write an opinion about it.)
Rather than try to show you things that it thinks you'd find agreeable, it shows you opinions that meet your epistemological and deductive methods, but have different conclusions. Detecting reasoning method would likely be difficult, but it might be possible to analyze your argument for similarities to another one, and then show you how people responded to that post.
Of course people would still think that there are logical faults in the other person's argument and dispute their facts, but the goal is to match you with people you'd like to argue with rather than with views you'd get a warm fuzzy by agreeing with. Likely, you'd want to put in a mix of the opinions that's roughly reflective of the user base (eg, X% of users support abortion, so about X% of the posts you see on the topic will concur with that view).
An interesting extension would be to see how far you can go down the formalism path without encumbering the process beyond what people are willing to put up with. (Perhaps require more formalism when introducing external sources, eg websites, and less when just talking about a free standing opinion.)
Regardless, I think we're going to see the rise of communities meant to mix and compete opinions, instead of making echo chambers of them.
I seem to recall it was practically defunct for a while, maybe while google news was in vogue/before it made (more of?) a point of showing "news fit for you". I suppose it might still show an interesting sampling, if opened in an incognito tab? (actually the Norwegian edition appears identical to me, logged in or not - so who knows?): https://news.google.com
Either way Google News insist on one choosing an "edition" -- would be more interesting if there was an "International English" edition IMNHO.
FWIW during the height of the #Occupy protests, I always found the various local/community web/fb pages more interesting than mainstream media. But it can be hard to sort through the deliberate and accidental mus-information when one hasn't got the ability to just walk down and talk to people there, to find out who's writing what, and get a sense of the why (I did eventually have the chance to visit and do that -- but travelling to another continent whenever something interesting is happening is obviously not a workable strategy. And I wouldn't exactly go hiking through Syria just to have a chat with people from all sides of the conflict...).
They get their "diverse" opinions from an echo chamber. They really believe they get diversw opinions but they are actually from people with the same agenda.
Let's be real here, national mainstream electronic media is somewhere between outright propaganda (yesterday's revelation and pictures of ISIS cross dressing soldiers retreating) and inane press release political fodder (sources in the White House report some BS that everyone knew anyway), and tabloid stuff.
In the old days 1994, there was at least some journalistic content on the news with Peter Jennings.
If you give a hoot about current events, the news isn't where you scratch that itch!
> In the old days 1994, there was at least some journalistic content on the news with Peter Jennings.
And people from a prior generation laughed at the idea of Peter Jennings being 'journalistic' and pinned their ideals on Brinkley and Huntley. Basically, this statement says nothing and means nothing, because it's just a generational marker, nothing more.
Broadcast news started out as an FCC mandate for licensing purpose, and a differentiator where more quality made a difference in the performance of the network. As the number of channels increased and mandates decreased, they shifted to a more "entertainy" format to keep viewers.
This stuff is all available online. Look at the information density of a random broadcast in 1965, 1975, etc. Signal goes down, noise goes up.
> Broadcast news started out as an FCC mandate for licensing purpose, and a differentiator where more quality made a difference in the performance of the network.
Given the history of news, this is very doubtful, unless you define 'quality' as 'more entertaining'.
> In the old days 1994, there was at least some journalistic content on the news with Peter Jennings.
And people from a prior generation laughed at the idea of Peter Jennings being 'journalistic' and pinned their ideals on Brinkley and Huntley. Basically, this statement says nothing and means nothing, because it's just a generational marker, nothing more.
Interestingly they declined to define 'news' .. perhaps the study proper did, though it's such a nebulous term that it's probably moot in any case.
Facebook is cited as being a primary source of news, yet items that I see pop up in the 'news' block on FB are generally of the fashion, entertainment and asinine activities of alleged celebrities variety... not news by my definition.
As far as I'm concerned, a kidnapping case from two states away isn't news.
News is something which could affect me or which I could affect; if it's an Amber Alert from my hometown or close by, it's news in a vague sense that, in theory, I might have some effect on it. (Statistically I'd have a better shot at winning a small prize in a lottery, but still...)
So: The Columbine school shooting? Not news. I've never lived near Columbine. The laws and changing social attitudes as a result of that? News.
'Millenials don't read newspapers' - or, as I like to call it, 'Another article telling you what young people do sourced from every possible avenue other than asking young people'.
Under 30s are the biggest readers of the local newspapers at my university, and the same can be said for my routing train travel and visits around the area. Young people are using an amazingly diverse selection of news sources that many older generations are simplly unaware of, or unwilling to admit.
not to mention, i don't care who you ask, if you mix 'social action and entertainment' with news, the end result is something i would avoid like the plague.
This isn't simply "another article" - its a significant study where they did exactly the opposite of what you described. They asked young people. Methodology is part of the OP [1].
You may very well have anecdotal evidence that millenials are reading newspapers, but this study seeks to move beyond anecdotal evidence.
>Under 30s are the biggest readers of the local newspapers at my university
Given that under 30s are, by an order of magnitude, the largest population attending a university, I would hope they make up the majority of the newspaper reading population. Even if 1% of them read the paper, and every faculty member read the paper, they'd still easily outnumber.
I live outside a college town and I have also observed that virtually all the students read the college newspaper. In my travels I've witnessed the same thing at other schools.
If young people aren't reading newspapers then where is the disconnect that happens when they graduate? One thing that I have observed is that campus newspapers are more focused on nighttime events which is not covered very well if at all by our daily paper.
@zwrose - they may be looking to move beyond anecdotal evidence but from what I took away they still seem to rely on the common perception that young people in general rely on technology/social media to the exclusion of traditional news media such as newspapers and news websites, this is what I was referring to.
@tw04 - UTS has a surprisingly high percentage of the student body over 30, there are many people taking technology courses or up-skilling through advanced courses as mature age students. Of this composite population, my observations are that the younger students rely more on traditional news media than the older ones, to the point of younger students actually reading a newspaper in a room full of 40-somethings on their phones. Quite entertaining to watch from a personal perspective
When a common perception is supported by statistically significant evidence, it starts to be more fact than perception. That's the point I was making. They aren't relying on a perception - they've taken a good step toward proving that the perception is true.
So they are worried that have lost the power to persuade people??
Why would I want to know about a hurricane the other part of the world? IMO 99% of the news are junk, but is my opinion. Imagine all the time you lost on being brain-washed.
Whenever I see an older relative frothing about some stupid article in the newspaper, or some pointless piece on TV - I just say 'why not switch it off? Why buy the paper anyway?'
I don't watch the news or read newspapers anymore, unless I happen to be in the vicinity of either by accident. If something important happens, I find out. Everyone does. Neighbours, people you work with - they're always delighted to share news you didn't hear about, and they don't drop in ads.
In the case of TV news and newspapers - lets say 6 hours a week glued to the talking heads and 4 hours a week in the paper = 500 hours a year - 12 24hr days in total, or 24 12hr days. All so they can sell your eyeballs to the highest bidder. Who wouldn't like 24 extra days time to do as they please with?
Stop paying attention to the media. You end up selling your time for pennies worth of benefit.