Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdb31 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, well, no. You can't really function in society these days without following 'The News' to at least some extent.

That doesn't mean you should buy into the '24h News Cycle' or the 'Extremism-inducing-filter-bubble', though. Myself, I don't pay any attention to 'The News', except as delivered on paper once-a-week via The Economist(1), and daily via their 'The World in Brief' email.

So, this morning, I learned that 'At one point an actor slapped a comedian, sending the internet into a frenzy' -- which is, like, all I needed to know, right?

Footnotes: (1) Yes, which is a relatively right-wing, centrist if you will, publication. I love it, especially disagreeing with it...

View on HN

In what way can you not function in society? Is that just in the sense that the news creates common cultural touchpoints for people to chat about around the water cooler? If so, as you say you don't really need to be that engaged to know the gist of what's going on. An occasional glance at a reputable, less-doomscrolly news source like the Econ, BBC, NYT or something like that should suffice.

I'm not sure we disagree? If you read The Economist weekly, you should be fine (although you can still be caught out not knowing about, say, today's Oscar's <tm, now go away> scandal.

But completely disconnecting from 'The News'? That won't work at all these days, I'm afraid. I quite vividly experienced this a while ago when I returned from living in the US to my native Netherlands: I was completely unaware of some extremely-popular local hit songs. So, when people quoted these to me, I just didn't get the reference, like, at all. This caused quite some awkward moments.

Now, magnify that experience to the world stage...

oh yeah I wasn't disagreeing with you, just trying to think about what you meant. I agree, you probably want to know the basic pop-cultural and international goings-on in order to not be left out of conversations.

I’m still not seeing the need for “The News” here. There’s no reason not to follow your interests/hobbies. And there are other ways to catch up on world events without the daily drip of sensationalism. The author isn’t saying you shouldn’t read anything ever.

But you don’t need to read the front page of CNN every day to stay up to date on the latest music. In fact, you’d be much better served by reading publications focused on that - the opposite of consuming the content meant for mass consumption.

People quote things that I don’t recognize all of the time. This is likely to happen for all kinds of reasons, e.g. generational gaps and not just because you stopped reading the daily headlines.

I think what you’re highlighting is that getting off the news hype cycle might make people around you notice. But a different response to that would be to have a conversation about why you unplugged.

That’s what I do, and it leads to some interesting conversations.

Only you can decide if the personal cost of continuing to consume is worthwhile just to maintain a certain vocabulary so you can continue socializing as you always have.

This isn’t a value judgement by the way, just an observation.

> That won't work at all these days, I'm afraid

I'm afraid I don't follow your point. Saying that something "won't work at all these days" means that there are meaningful, and I stress: meaningful, aspects of our life that totally break down in the absence of said thing. An occasional few seconds of awkwardness (which is a totally fine emotion to feel) regarding some celeb drama is, in all honesty, insignificant. You didn't talk about being fired or being shunned, being discriminated or being laughed at; you presented a very very bland example equivalent to admitting to your colleagues that you didn't notice a new coffee machine was installed. Maybe you suffer from a mental condition that amplifies these emotions so much that you can't stand that occasional awkwardness, but I don't see how that justifies defending being addicted to the news cycle.

> [The Economist] is a relatively right-wing, centrist if you will, publication.

A comment above, in response to the publication being labelled as having "a sharp left / European bias" says:

> The rest of the world would mostly call it "left-leaning", or maybe "radical centrist".

I would probably categorize it as centrist myself, but it's funny how confirmation bias works.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com