>While many of the points made by this article are valid, it fails to address important questions like: how can we remain informed
Well, an earlier question would be: why should we "remain informed"?
To have something to talk about with friends, or because it "matters"?
If it matters, it's not just news we get from media to us, but something we actively follow and do something about it (e.g. it might be labour laws and we're a union). If that's the case, news will get to us one way or another, and with more primary sources and higher quality than what we'd have learned from the media.
>and how do we decide what is important enough to be informed about?
Did anything you were "informed about" in the past by news made any real difference in your life (you having been informed, not the news item itself).
> >While many of the points made by this article are valid, it fails to address important questions like: how can we remain informed
> Well, an earlier question would be: why should we "remain informed"?
IMHO you hit the nail on the head here. Everyone has been conditioned by the news media to assume that we need to follow the news, which they then conflate with "remaining informed".
I go after the information I'm interested in or lacking as needed, like financial or housing market info. Then other info comes to me if it's relevant, like local elections or topics of mutual interest with my friends (or places like HN).
I understand how you seek financial info, but how does Hacker News come to you? How does local election info come to you?
And I don’t mean what device or medium, but literally _how_ if you aren’t actively clicking or tapping to access it by way of a bookmark or otherwise?
I feel like the original post really wanted to say “control your FOMO and critically consider what news sources you value”, but became too wrapped up in some anti-mainstream media emotion.
Submissions by other users come to me through HN. I don't have to search through dates, topics, countries, etc. I just click enter and it all comes to me.
> How does local election info come to you?
I get emails about it for my state, I get physical mail from my state, I get emails about it from my employer, I hear friends/family/coworkers talk about it, I see signs out and about.
Not being flippant, but just because these things don't happen to you doesn't mean they don't happen to anyone. I even learned about some recall election in CA while on vacation there that I made zero effort to learn about. I just saw billboards, flyers in grocery stores, etc.
Clicking Hacker News is seeking news the same way as clicking CNN.
Signing up for emails (presumably) isn’t organically hearing about it via billboards or voluntary conversation; it’s willfully agreeing to have news appear in your inbox.
How does this differ from the person who visits Fox News or CNN and follows a group on Facebook to see their posts appear in their news feed?
> Did anything you were "informed about" in the past by news made any real difference in your life (you having been informed, not the news item itself).
On the recent past, vaccine availability, COVID related restrictions, and when to relax a little bit on the extreme safety conservatism because hospitals actually had any room. Of course, those were on local news, that is much more useful than national or the completely useless global one. "The news" is basically the channel any large institution use to communicate with people, so any general institutional information comes from there.
Also, a big constant is when to buy or sell government bonds (for other, more volatile and specialized things, the news is useless).
I think the distinction here is actively seeking out information when it becomes relevant to you personally vs. passively absorbing information through the news in case it might be relevant. Being armed with information that is pertinent to you is useful, but 99% of the information you receive in the news doesn't meet the standard of pertinence, even if you initially think it does.
It would be impossible to miss information about Covid even if you were living under rock. Once you become aware that there is a potentially deadly pandemic underway, you can go and look for information regarding steps to protect yourself, notifications from authorities, etc. You will still get the same important information. But what I've found over the last year or so is that passively scrolling regarding updates inundates me with information that feels important, but ultimately changes very little for me personally, other than heightening my sense of anxiety and uncertainty, and messing with my ability to make judgements regarding risk.
Very little of the world's ills seem to be improved or altered at all by the fact that individuals are bombarded with news more now than ever before. But our ability to cope with those ills seems far lessened due to this deluge of information.
> but 99% of the information you receive in the news doesn't meet the standard of pertinence
Oh, no doubt about that. Maybe add another 9.
It helps to consume it written, so you can jump over all the trash.
> It would be impossible to miss information about Covid even if you were living under rock.
But this is not the case. I know people that missed useful information because they were living under a rock. And yes, after you know what to look for, it's not hard to go get high-quality information elsewhere. But a channel for "notifications from authorities" simply does not exist... or rather, it exists, it's called "mainstream news".
Anyway, I agree that a short news cycle does indeed not help anybody and harms a lot of people.
I've remained informed about these issues without frequenting any "news" sources. Government, hospital, pharmacy sites all provide that without the "clickbait" factor (or at least with much less).
I will note that CSPAN / the debate on the US Congress (both the House and the Senate) are surprisingly well informed about politics.
Its a bit of an investment: it takes a while to learn the "rules" of discussion (and the rules are different for the House and Senate). And its highly opinionated as well. But if you want to know what the big issues are on any given day, its hard to beat Congress.
Seriously. Give CSPAN a try. Its boring as heck but welcome to reality. Do you want to know the opinions of some random blogger with no power? Or do you want to know the opinions of the literal lawmakers of this country?
If you're going to read / study opinion pieces, its clear who's opinions are most important. Its not a pundit on NBC, its not the pundit writing articles for (insert paper here). Those people have no power and are basically armchair quarterbacks.
> Do you want to know the opinions of some random blogger with no power? Or do you want to know the opinions of the literal lawmakers of this country?
Congressmembers are not giving their unfiltered opinion in floor (or committee) speeches, they are very conscious of the public eye and are saying what they think they need to be heard saying to achieve their goals. If you aren't following other information sources to contextualize what you are hearing, this is equivalent to getting your news about an industry exclusively from the press releases of the two biggest firms in the industry.
The bias is obvious however: you can instantly pick out Democrats from Republicans.
I don't read / watch opinion pieces to know how to think. I read / watch opinion pieces to know _what other people are thinking_.
And I don't really care what a politician thinks/feels deep down inside. I care about what a politician is calculating in their public image: why they're voting for (or against) particular measures. Sure, they might change their opinion a year or two from now, but if we're talking about the important issues affecting our country today (ex: debt ceiling and its knock-on-effects)... what these politicians are saying today is the opinion that matters.
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> this is equivalent to getting your news about an industry exclusively from the press releases of the two biggest firms in the industry.
The issue is that far too many people don't even use this source of information at all, and are instead getting their opinion / reviews from pundits who really don't matter at all in the great scheme of things.
Today's citizen is more likely to be "informed" by some random talk-show host, or crazed nut over the radio that no one gives a care about... rather than know what our actual leaders are doing.
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In any case, the infographics / arguments used by people in Congress are pretty compelling in general. Yeah, there's some complete crap here and there, but its important to also know the bullcrap some people think.
A lot of information is from very solid sources: they interview Generals / Commanders from Afghanistan, so we get to hear the direct witnesses / decision makers to various events. They can pull in statistics from CDC, FDA, BLS, Fed, State Department, etc. etc. Think-tanks are commonly quoted to various degrees of success (some think-tanks are fine, others are clearly biased).
The quality of information presented is just head-and-shoulders above the average newspaper / blog / radio host.
There's SCOTUSBlog for the Supreme Court. People often mistake it for being from the court, but it's independent. Legal Eagle on YouTube is good if you don't mind video.
The problem is that this kind of useful information may come from a huge amount of sources that you can only know to look after you have some of the info.
We're beginning to decline overall as a country, but I do live in one of the areas that's seeing an increase in COVID19 cases. National-level newspapers tend to focus on the overall average, but the overall average is meaningless compared to county-level information.
COVID19 cases are +20% in my area where I live, but maybe -10% as a country since last week. The local-case count is far more important to me than what is going on 10 states away.
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Both national-level and local data is important: I have friends all across the country, and its important for me to know how they're doing. But local data is _far_ more important and far more relevant.
Well, I don't live in the US, but that's not the point.
Recent times were very weird in that all the important information was about the same single subject. You don't know if that trend will continue until tomorrow (literally), and historically the world has almost never behaved like this.
Well, an earlier question would be: why should we "remain informed"?
To have something to talk about with friends, or because it "matters"?
If it matters, it's not just news we get from media to us, but something we actively follow and do something about it (e.g. it might be labour laws and we're a union). If that's the case, news will get to us one way or another, and with more primary sources and higher quality than what we'd have learned from the media.
>and how do we decide what is important enough to be informed about?
Did anything you were "informed about" in the past by news made any real difference in your life (you having been informed, not the news item itself).