I thought this was a really interesting article about the ways that news is bad for you. The author's conclusion is that the only solution is to cut out all news:
We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk, regardless of its real probability. If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong. Bankers and economists – who have powerful incentives to compensate for news-borne hazards – have shown that they cannot. The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely.
Whilst I agree with many of the author's premises, I come to quite a different conclusion: we need different kinds of news. As the author acknowledges, most of the problems he discusses arise from the bite sized nuggets of news we often consume, as opposed to really learning about a subject:
In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind.
Although the author doesn't discuss it, I feel that this applies particularly to the rolling news channels. I'm always amazed at how uninformed I am coming away from a session watching them; it appears that nothing happens, slowly. You would think that with all that time to fill, we would get more analysis, but analysis is hard - pointing a camera at someone On The Scene who doesn't really know what's happening is much easier. Yet is the situation really just as bad when you read the news?
Obviously, it depends on what news you're reading. Prospect magazine is a great example of news that is given space to breath, to go a little deeper, and analyse what is happening behind the surface facts. Admittedly its web offerings are a little sparse. I realise it's a little hard to make the case for The Economist being more balanced than its reputation suggests in a week whose cover features Margaret Thatcher's face with the words Freedom Fighter emblazoned across them, but I would imagine that anyone who has troubled its pages will agree that it really goes in depth into a lot of issues. Its special reports in particular are worth seeking out.
Yet I think there is something more to this than just singling out good sources of information. It depends on how we choose to consume the news. If we passively gorge on the news, ruminating on the days events as if they were celebrity gossip, then it doesn't matter how good our sources are. It is up to us to actively interact with the news, to try and understand it and the direction it is taking. This is something the author explicitly discounts:
Obviously, it depends on what news you're reading. Prospect magazine is a great example of news that is given space to breath, to go a little deeper, and analyse what is happening behind the surface facts. Admittedly its web offerings are a little sparse. I realise it's a little hard to make the case for The Economist being more balanced than its reputation suggests in a week whose cover features Margaret Thatcher's face with the words Freedom Fighter emblazoned across them, but I would imagine that anyone who has troubled its pages will agree that it really goes in depth into a lot of issues. Its special reports in particular are worth seeking out.
Yet I think there is something more to this than just singling out good sources of information. It depends on how we choose to consume the news. If we passively gorge on the news, ruminating on the days events as if they were celebrity gossip, then it doesn't matter how good our sources are. It is up to us to actively interact with the news, to try and understand it and the direction it is taking. This is something the author explicitly discounts:
News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is inverted. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists' radar but have a transforming effect. The more "news factoids" you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand.
I disagree. It's all well and good formulating a theory of the 'powerful movements' that shape the world, but if these theories aren't in some kind of feedback loop with how the world is actually turning out then there's a serious problem. If you think that Marx's theory of the inevitability of proletarian revolution is just fine and dandy, with no need to be updated, then you probably need to look around you more.
Ultimately, then, this comes down to a confrontation between idealists and empiricists. I believe that if you are trying to formulate a picture of how the world is, then it's pretty important to keep looking at the world. I agree with the author that a passive relationship to the news probably does you no good, but that just means we should seek out deeper analyses and try to come to our own conclusions.
If I can be forgiven a brief bit of Heidegger, I would argue that the problem arises when news is treated as 'idle chatter.' Heidegger hated 'curiosity', which he defined as being 'concerned with the constant possibility of distraction... it concerns itself with a kind of knowing, but just in order to have known.' Being au fait with the news is the kind of gossip that a certain type of middle class person needs to show they fit in: 'Idle talk controls even the ways in which one may be curious. It says what one "must" have read and seen.'
Now, I have quite a different attitude towards 'idle talk' and, indeed, gossip, but that's for another article. My point is that this article confines itself to a certain kind of news consumption, where news is seen simply as a topic for chatter over dinner parties, where consuming it makes you feel you're part of a 'bigger conversation'. Whilst I don't believe this is entirely negative, the points the author makes could certainly apply in this case. However, if you really want to understand the world, you have to know what is happening in it.
Cutting yourself off from the news might stop you from being absorbed in 'bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world', but is it not more likely to trap you in your own little bubble? To get further into the deeper world, you first of all have to break the surface.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli
Ultimately, then, this comes down to a confrontation between idealists and empiricists. I believe that if you are trying to formulate a picture of how the world is, then it's pretty important to keep looking at the world. I agree with the author that a passive relationship to the news probably does you no good, but that just means we should seek out deeper analyses and try to come to our own conclusions.
If I can be forgiven a brief bit of Heidegger, I would argue that the problem arises when news is treated as 'idle chatter.' Heidegger hated 'curiosity', which he defined as being 'concerned with the constant possibility of distraction... it concerns itself with a kind of knowing, but just in order to have known.' Being au fait with the news is the kind of gossip that a certain type of middle class person needs to show they fit in: 'Idle talk controls even the ways in which one may be curious. It says what one "must" have read and seen.'
Now, I have quite a different attitude towards 'idle talk' and, indeed, gossip, but that's for another article. My point is that this article confines itself to a certain kind of news consumption, where news is seen simply as a topic for chatter over dinner parties, where consuming it makes you feel you're part of a 'bigger conversation'. Whilst I don't believe this is entirely negative, the points the author makes could certainly apply in this case. However, if you really want to understand the world, you have to know what is happening in it.
Cutting yourself off from the news might stop you from being absorbed in 'bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world', but is it not more likely to trap you in your own little bubble? To get further into the deeper world, you first of all have to break the surface.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli
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