How much should I care about news? - eviltoast
News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
www.theguardian.com
News is bad for you. It leads to fear and aggression. It hinders your creativity and makes you sick. We should stop consuming it, says Rolf Dobelli, who's abstained for years

I read this article recently and I was just thinking about my news consumption and how much I want to be affected by it.

I feel like it is important because shit is going on in the world however I usually don’t change my habits much over it.

I also think that there should be a middle ground somewhere but I can’t think of it so if anyone of you have ideas please share them.

  • jarfil@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    10 months ago

    If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong

    Is that a thing about neurotypicals, or just people without any selfcontrol?

    I know I can compensate all the rhetorics, because I can spot most of the techniques by name, never get “pulled in” by the news, extract only the facts (if there are any), then contrast them with other sources, before “making my mind” about anything. I’m not afraid of saying “beats me, I don’t know enough”, until I do learn enough to build a consistent picture without holes or contradictions (doesn’t mean I’m always right, just coherent). Most times when I look at news, I end up taking away maybe a single sentence, which almost never is the one being highlighted.

    There is also picking which news sources to care about. Right now I only know about two sources that are somewhat impartial: one of them is the weather channel, and the other a news meta-debate where they like inviting people with opposite points of view, without letting it turn into a cage match.

    As for the rest of the article… it’s just describing the techniques used to produce what I like to call “news for toddlers”: fake human interest, full of rhetorical resources, cut down into tidbits easy to chew and swallow, aimed at eliciting an emotional response rather than a rational one (BTW, they’re the same techniques used by trolls).

    You shouldn’t care about “that kind” of news. There are other kinds, like scientific breakthroughs, investigative reports, or news meta-analyses, that you might want to care about. Or whether to take an umbrella tomorrow.