Mar 31
The News
For and Against:
For
• Holding government and authorities accountable; journalism keeps society honest.
• Informed decision-making for personal safety and various betting markets; first-mover advantages
• We need social entertainment
Against
• Selective attention:
-Importance/infotainment/fomo/gossip/voyeurism. Perspective: space, time, magnitude, idiosyncrasy
-Superficiality
-Censorship: restricted speech and censorship of violence misleads
-Negativity
>Anxiety: informedness without agency. An addictive, stressful irrelevance. Clickbait gamifies outrage-mining.
>Depression: doomscrolling; is it ethical to spread harmful info?
• Illusory caring
• Illusory social connection
• Manipulated by governments or media moguls or social consensus
• Polarising: influencing and pandering to a demographic
24 hour breaking news in the smartphone world is like an unethical social experiment.
And don’t get me started on advertising…
For a lot of people:
The digital attention economy is poison.
Information processing is overwhelming to sanity.
Perhaps the information explosion / infodemic / infobesity is the most neglected modern malady as well as global catastrophic risk.
Ignorance is bliss?
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed”
