This op/ed is heavy with claims and light on proof. Is it anything more than an advert for the author’s book? It seems reactionary for no reason.
A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What’s relevant? The structural stability of the bridge.
Yes. Humans are fragile and we need to make sure they are not in danger before we then – later – investigate the engineering components. Is there news out there that does not worry about the stability of bridges after such events? The same goes for earthquakes, floods, and the like. First we worry about survivability, and later we look at what engineering worked and which failed.
I also see no need for news to be consumed as unquestionable gospel. The state of U.S. politics has led me to believe that yes, in fact, there are people who DO take it that way, but I know enough people who question beyond the sound bites to think that the author here is overstating the idea that consuming news reduces critical thinking. I do, however, suspect that it is harder to concentrate on heavily linked article than ones that save references for the end.
Anyone try to click the link to the study on how ‘links are bad’ – the link is BAD. I got a 404 (perhaps it is a regional issue?). By cutting out the chunk, ‘magazine/’, I got a working link: www.wired.com/2010/05/ff-nicholas-carr/
Replying to myself: the last time the news mattered in my daily life was this week when I considered flying to Fairbanks, Alaska and discovered that prices are significantly higher than a year ago. I suspect the hike relates to the grounding of planes as seen from that video of the door plug failure and the FAAs subsequent grounding of that type of plane (and possibly a second type now, but last I heard that was not yet a hard grounding, but only inspection). This gives me a general idea that perhaps prices will drop when the planes are back in service and I’m better off waiting until then.
The car and bridge one, is an example of “human interest” news, which some reporters, and news channels, try very hard to push for (“after seeing your son ripped to shreds and your husband fall into a volcano… tell us, how did that make you feel?”). Call me a monster, but I don’t care about that. Or rather, I already know that they’ll feel devastated, no need to rub it in.
Is there news out there that does not worry about the stability of bridges after such events?
Unfortunately, yes. There are whole news channels which, as soon as they get done with one emotional trigger news, they switch to the next one.
The article is oversensationalized, but it does hide a grain of truth: avoid that kind of sources, and you’ll be better off.
36 here too, two kids. I have been overwhelmed with fear the past few years that something like this will happen. I can only imagine that if I received the news you did, it would cripple me. Immediate shutdown.
I wish I had more to offer than my sympathy. I wish we could do better with cancer than we can…
The main problem there is you then don’t get any nuance, and often have no idea what’s really going on. Well, as much as you possibly could know what’s really going on.
Funny, I was just thinking about posting this, even though it’s like ten years old! For anyone who’d like to read more on this topic from the article’s author, have a look here (PDF).
Personally what I’ve found works for me is to focus on news that’s local to me, the more local the better. So I start with news about my municipality, then my province, then my country, and I try to keep it at that for the most part. Of course, world news slips through, especially American politics, but I try to keep it at bay as much as possible.
I honestly had a bit of a nervous breakdown around the start of the war in Ukraine, doomscrolling through articles and updates everyday. I realized I needed to dial back and tried to cut out all news, and that just ended up making me more anxious. Focusing on local news has been the Goldilocks zone for me. I’ll still consume stuff about world news occasionally, but it’s usually in a way that relates to my country, for example articles about Canada’s support of Israel on the world stage.
Some news sources are definitely more inflammatory than others. I’m also of the opinion that television news in general is a farce, to the extent that the best “journalists” on TV in recent memory have been comedians like Jon Stewart and John Oliver.
I’m francophone and queer living under a conservative provincial government that dislikes francophones and queers, I do like to be on top of what rights they’re trying to attack this week.
Apart from that, I guess a general sense that you need to know what’s wrong if you want to fix it. Am I aware that I’m ultimately powerless to fix societal woes? Yeah, that’s why I cut back on the news, but cutting it out completely feels like giving up any hope of fixing anything. That’s just too much of a downer for me.
I still read the news and argue about it with people on the internet, which is what I’m recommending against doing. Don’t be me. Live your life. I’m seriously not sure I’m more off “informed” than if I were to just draw furry erotica all day.
For me, the key question is, What does being up to date help you? And my answer, as someone that is constantly up to date, is that it doesn’t.
It’s been pretty nice so far. Last weekend I finished a project I’ve been working on since April last year so I’ve finally been able to relax over the weekend for maybe the first time in ~3 months. In related news: I also finally got to start Spider-Man 2 and that has been a lot of fun too.
It was a personal project. I was planning a party, which doesn’t sound like a lot; but I really wanted it to go well, so I was putting in a lot of work on decorations, goody bags, catering, etc. (Plus I’ve never planned a party before)
Shut your whore mouth! On occasion, a post might just slip by the assholes. Make another blanket statement like that and I’ll swat your grandma live on 8chan.
Originally reddit was a niche site with few visitors that was full of knowledge and a strong sense of community.
Then during Gamergate (2014), several organizational subs were created by rancid basement dwelling mysogitrolls that soon found that not only did they not get banned for doxxing and harassing people, that they gathered even more rancid basement dwelling mysogitrolls to their ranks and realized they weren’t as rare as they worried.
Then 2015 rolled around and a SHITTON of alt-right wastes of their own father’s protein came around for the whole trumpfest that reddit became at the time.
And they never left.
On the other hand, a ton of people who created content and supported other users with meaningful replies all decided it wasn’t worth the constant harassment, doxxing, malicious reporting, bigotry, botting and refusal of the admins to address said behaviors.
And we left.
So the only redditors still there are either shitstains or too emotionally invested to leave yet.
And that latter group will get smaller and smaller as the shitstains become louder and more emboldened.
Seriously though, I’ve been using Reddit since probably about 2012. I never really put time into analyzing it’s demise. I didn’t care enough. Thanks for the information. 🙂
Organic Maps currently only supports metro/subway navigation, not buses, trains or other types of PT (although they are planning on introducing a new map layer for that). Bike routing works, although only fully separated bike paths are rendered.
@JohnDumpling oh, I see. I thought only my city was not supported. OsmAnd does have on the ground transit routes though. And there's also Transportr and Offi, but they do not support all the cities (and clearly not bike paths).
I have a temporary dream (as in we’ll see how long this lasts…) of building a database of legislation by state that can easily be queried.
I think a lot of people rely on the news to tell them how to interpret legislation when it’s actually really easy to figure it out for yourself if you know where to look. And with the proliferation of AI, it should be even easier to know what legislation is without some political analyst with an agenda.
Anyway, the idea is to have all this available on one website that uses open source code for the underlying database.
it’s actually really easy to figure it out for yourself if you know where to look.
Yeah, but different people interpret legislation differently, and the gramatically literal interpretation isn’t always the “right” one. So it would be smart to also include links to any cases or precedents based on them.
That would be a great project indeed… just a heads up:
I was part of a group exploring to do something similar a couple decades ago. The main problem we found, was dealing with those first two points: by the time we figured out all the places a single “state” (this wasn’t in the US) stored all their legislation, they had already changed some of them. We realized that it would take either: collaboration from the government in terms of standardizing how they store things… or a constant game of chasing around the changes they made. At the time, we concluded it wasn’t practical to do it for free, and indeed some paid services have emerged offering something similar, but they’re not open.
My suggestion: if you managed to find a way for governments to make legislation accessible in a standardized way, that would be a HUGE success. Ideally, have it written into constitution, and/or use the constitution to beat government bodies into compliance.
Also a warning: the messy state of things, seems to be a sort of “job security” for some lawyer firms and companies offering the consolidation services, so taking that away may not be easy.
It might not help you as it seems you might be in the US, but I regularly donate to MIND (a UK mental health charity), mermaids UK (A UK trans youth charity), Stonewall, and Greenpeace. I think they’re all awesome.
I also support the Awesome Socks Club, which isn’t really a charity donation but they’re donating 100% of profits to various charities, they said they’re trying to beat Paul Newman’s company’s charitable contributions which is a huge effort, it supports independent artists, and you get cool socks to top it off. (www.good.store)
You’re right-- I am in the States, but your input is still welcome!
I don’t have an Awesome Socks subscription, but I do have a Sun Basin Soap one with good.store! I like Daydreamer, even though it sorta reminds me of allspice (and therefore chicken).
I’ve grown disillusioned with Greenpeace, they seem to have lost their north a long time ago, and only hop onto the bandwagon of what’s cool at any given moment. Like, “no fossil, no nuclear, no global warming” are all cool and all… but a contradiction. Or the silliness they’re doing right now in Spain, of combing whole beaches to remove a few pounds of plastic pellets from each… only for more to come the next day… while 30-odd years ago we already used to wonder what were all the multicolored “sand” grains, and some kids used to pick up chunks of tar to chew like gum.
I would suggest either Extinction Rebellion, which has an interesting open governance system with local chapters, and is “effective” in the sense of pissing people off enough to get itself on TV… or any local charity focused on a single achievable goal (sifting plastic pellets from a multi-ton dump at a rate of a few pounds per day, is a populist waste of resources; reforesting some area with native species, is direct and effective; and so on).
Like JKR not being pro-trans is just her opinion. And as far as I know, she hasn’t gone on a crusade against anyone yet.
using a large public platform to disseminate the same kinds of anti-trans arguments currently being used by bigots to draft legislation putting trans people at risk is not just an opinion. like, it isn’t a crusade, but when there is a crusade going on and you’re saying the same thing the crusaders are saying, its not a good look.
I’m not really up to date on JKR to be honest. It was mostly an example of someone who was asked her opinion, gave it and it pissed people off enough for it to become an issue.
There’s a reason we shouldn’t look to celebrities for answers or anything other than the entertainment they supply.
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