Ignore the news
medium.com
medium.com
This has been said before, but I'd also argue that the constant news cycle is just harmful, period. The most recent manifestation of this for me was the Boston Bombings...it was a terrible event, but not being in Boston, there was literally no benefit I could gain from listening to the minute by minute coverage. But I did it anyway, even checking it late in the night and early in the morning. When that situation was resolved...all those accumulated hours of listening didn't mean a thing. News shouldn't be consumed like a TV series, in which the point is the journey, rather than the conclusion.
I think it's better to think of the breaking news phenomenon in psychological terms, rather than content. It's not that you're necessarily obsessed with shootings, bombings, and celeb drug rehab, but that the constant stream of dilemma and reward (when a new turn unfolds) must have a similar effect to other endorphin-releasing habits.
And while I'm just throwing pop psychology out there...it is indisputable that the news covers the novel and unlikely, that's why it is "news". Consuming too much of it will distort your reality and perception of what's "normal". After doing cops reporting, I couldn't help but feel extra paranoid when walking certain streets when off the job..."This is where people get shot" is an entirely irrational way to judge a neighborhood, but it won't seem irrational if that's your primary or first acquaintance with the area.
This is exactly it.
I had an 8-hour a day office job with about 10 minutes of actual work a day for a couple of years (so a whole heck of a lot of time to kill), and frequently spent hours every day reading the news. One day I asked myself, "What have I learned?"
I couldn't come up with anything.
After that, I quit reading the news and started reading classics like "The Prince" and "The Brothers Grimm" and "The Grapes of Wrath." Much better use of free time than reading the same rehashed stories of shootings and stabbings and rapes and murders and robberies and earthquakes and bombings and shark attacks over and over again with only slightly different details.
I know this isn't really relevant to the main topic under discussion, but thank you so much for posting this. I thought I was the only one in the world. I work eight hours a day and I have between 10-30 minutes of real work to do each day, mainly fairly dull administrative stuff and answering the occasional email.
I'm not underperforming, I do everything that's asked of me and plenty more besides, but there's just not enough for me to do. I can't even surf job sites or anything, to find something a bit more stimulating, because my screen is overlooked by colleagues. The workplace is poorly organised and unstructured - there are no performance reviews, no targets, nothing.
I end up spending most of the day reading HN in my browser (because it's a 'safe' text based site that I can read without it being eye-catching to colleagues/the boss) and other sites in elinks in a terminal (to prevent images, huge fonts, etc). I also listen to a lot of speech radio, because that's invisible and still stimulating.
I don't know why I really wrote this comment, but I just wanted to say how appreciative I am that I know I'm not the only one. It's been 18 months now...
(Throwaway because my real account is under my real name.)
For the first year or two it seems cool to be paid to do nothing but after a while I realised I was literally idling away my life, so I switched to actually building things instead.
Sometimes I consider breaking things, just so I've got something to do to fix them...
You don't need technology to do that.
You can just stay informed by buying a high quality newspaper or news magazine and read that. For example, (personal choices ahead), you could read The Economist once per week. Or, since he appears to be in the UK, you could have a quality daily paper (e.g. Daily Telegraph weekdays and the Observer on Sundays).
The Telegraph is pretty conservative and the Observer fairly liberal. The two views are interesting. I don't think I could take The Guardian every day. And given that I also have Le Monde as well that's plenty of centre-left stuff.
Do you read Le Monde because of its language or would you still read it if it were in English?
One other thing about the Telegraph on a daily basis that's important to some people: the crossword.
In general, it's better to buy the Sunday Times on a Sunday because the Observer is online whereas the Sunday Times is behind a paywall....
Absolutely not. All you're doing is trading one form of emotional manipulation for another.
I understand what's going on by 1) scanning written commentary. Oddly enough, when the emotional manipulation is out in the open, it has much less effect, and 2) watching CNN's "Reliable Sources", a somewhat unreliable account of the business of news reporting. The meta story -- what editors and reporters decide to cover and why -- gives me the big news stories and the way they were slanted on different outlets.
Don't substitute comedy for this 24-hour-news mishmash. Bad. Idea. Comedy is always about biting satire and conformity, many times directed at large groups of people. All you're going to learn is how to fit in with some kind of group the comedian is a member of, and we need a lot less of us vs. them in the world.
"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers."
Of course this assumes that you're not in the business of knowing what other people know. If it's important being in the zeitgeist than you have to keep track of the drivel. This is one downside of working in Sales. :-)
Ahh: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1340891/Judge-James-...
Doesn't say when he said it though.
It seems that if James Pickles did ask that question, it was probably later than that, since he was a judge from 1975 to 1991 (and that Daily Mail obit. says "From the mid-1980s onwards, he became a household name for his colourful opinions and remarks").
Interesting side-notes that his sister was the actress playing the mother of Ross and Monica on Friends, and he seemed to have a rather modern view on drugs: "Cannabis never killed anybody and it's use is widespread. You can’t stop it. The law defeats itself because all the efforts to stop drugs coming in only drives up the prices and then gangsters move in to push the drugs. If they legalised there wouldn't be gangsters and huge profits..."
Also, by choosing to get his news from Twitter over let's say NPR, this idiot is choosing to be misinformed. Of all the hoax or inaccurate stories that I've come across this year, Twitter take the crown followed by news aggregators and email. The only false NPR story I can think of was the TAL retraction of the story on work conditions in Apple factories. According to my twitter last week "NASA disproved global warming"
And apparently, a penchant for throwing around insults.
choosing to get his news from Twitter over let's say NPR
Of all the hoax or inaccurate stories that I've come across this year, Twitter take the crown followed by news aggregators and email.
Twitter is just an aggregation technology. If you get inaccurate stories, it's due to your own choices of sources.
Sorry if my insults offended you, but this article was link bait trash designed to make the misinformed, filter-bubbled, over-protective moms feel better about themselves. I call it how I see it.
"People" (usually) don't create news, they filter them from other sources, such as news outlets. Some republish crap, others distort those news when tweeting them, others mostly just filter the irrelevant and republish the useful.
Getting crap is a consequence of your own choices, not of the underlying technology.
Sorry if my insults offended you, but this article was link bait trash designed to make the misinformed, filter-bubbled, over-protective moms feel better about themselves. I call it how I see it.
However its not 100% waste. At least here in Argentina, what I read on the newspaper have direct consequences on economic decisions in the every-day life. Literally, from going to the super market, to spending with your credit-card to buying illegal currency.
On the other hand, Argentina is going through the middle of a political-economical crisis so the news become a very relevant termometer.
Now, that doesn't mean i did what the author did. Respect for that, i'm a little envious of him.
ignore the news is the new oh we don't own a tv. or oh i don't listen to "popular" music.
Making the conscious choice to filter to your preferrences is important and liberating because it enables you more control over the kind of life you want to live.
by filtering at the source, you will never be exposed to something outside your bubble. the NYT front page (as an example) is great as it covers such a wide array of topics, just browsing over them gives you the chance to learn something new.
if your current interests and beliefs act as filters, then how will you ever develop new ones?
or, coming down to the core topic of this site, how will you know how your audience/target group/customers tick if you never see the world through their eyes? look at all the nerd-startups solving nerd problems (asana?...) - and how frustrated they all get by the success of tumblr, instagram, etc.
good retail CEOs watch fox news and read the ny post (or equivalents) to get a feel for their customers world.
>if your current interests and beliefs act as filters, then how will you ever develop new ones?
This partly comes down to being another personal choice and also consider that many things are linked in a way that enables you to develop new interests and beliefs.
One example of this is Wikipedia. Starting from pretty much any point of interest, you can find a great depth of chain linked resources to information you can choose to read and allow influence your interests and beliefs
>or, coming down to the core topic of this site, how will you know your audience... ?
Best to start by building what you know however I realise that's unrealistic. After that you just accept that you can't filter everything because somethings you want in your bubble have baggage. "Every rose has its thorne" as the saying goes.
I read a lot about this "no news/news is bad for you" meme going around the past few years and I have to admit it's getting a little lame. How about just taking the news for what it is and take in what you want and leave the rest. Am I odd in that I don't have any emotional reaction when I hear of a rape, murder, or most other tragedies on the news? I was in Europe during the Oklahoma tornadoes and when I heard about it on the news when I came back I thought "hmm, so this is the new big story for the next week" before falling asleep. It's not that I don't care, but I also kind of don't care.