On reading the news being considered harmful
by Josh Staiger
I would like to mirror and flesh-out my comment that I posted to Jeff's weblog in response to his comment on Philip Greenspun's latest entry "Reading the news considered harmful".
In short, Philip makes the very interesting observation that people's fascination with reading the news may in fact be an indication of "economic and intellectual stagnation".
I find that the best way to combat this is to be very discriminative about what reads. I try to only read very high-quality content (like Philip Greenspun's weblog for instance) on a daily basis. I try to avoid subscribing to any "high volume" feeds (such as more traditional news outlets that have multiple new items per day). Lately, I have also been eliminating a lot of the feeds that I don't think are up to snuff.
This means that at most I will get a handful of new item to be read each day, but each item that I read is likely to be sufficiently intellectually stimulating. It also means that there is no temptation to continually wast time checking my feedreader because I'm aware of the fact that there will likely not be any new items available to me.
I think that Philip G's assertion that keeping up on the news on a daily basis in effect makes one "stupider" is an interesting one. I know that for a while I was trying to get into the habit of picking up a newspaper every Sunday and reading it "cover to cover" on the premise that I should be more aware of my surroundings. I have fallen out of the habit lately and had been somewhat berating myself for it, but perhaps my unconscious was just trying to tell me something.
What new things did I usually learn week to week? George Bush said such and such really stupid thing. John Kerry said such and such utterly unprofound thing. More people died in Iraq. Israelis and Palestinians hate each other. North Carolina is losing jobs.
I find that anyone who does not completely live in a cave will ultimately learn any really important news simply as a product of their environment - either by hearing it from other people or being hit over the head with it. I first heard about the Sept 11th attacks by word of mouth - not by watching CNN.
Usually late-breaking news is so speculative anyway, and one has to sift through so much kruft on the off chance of tripping over something mildly important. It's much more efficient to wait until the news has more time to be digested and filters down to the higher quality channels that have commentators who have actually taken the time to think about what they are saying.
I know that when I was in college I very rarely had time to keep up with the news at all. At the time I largely considered this to be a bad thing. But what did I really miss? There was something about some politician and an intern that my mom was really excited about when she would call me on the phone. Gary Condit I think his name was? What else? Laci Peterson? Perhaps this is an ideal I should be getting back to.