I have a tendency to read sites like digg and slashdot. Sometimes I become addicted to having a flow of information coming in, and I feel like I’m being productive by learning about what is going on in the world. When I’m addicted to them, I get to the point where I will refresh the page after reading stories, and also check other news sources, or the weather, and it leads to me becoming less productive in what I really want to do. Ideally every piece of knowledge I gain will help me gain happiness by being useful or entertaining. After gaining the new information, I’ll be happy I gained it. The current sources of news don’t provide information that is useful like this.
There are several problems with news sources. They only exist to make a profit. This itself isn’t necessarily bad, but news publishers will try to report on stories that will increase their profits. The average person likes to hear about gossip mostly. If you watch Fox news for example, they will report for weeks on one missing individual, interviewing everyone in the town, trying to give you every little detail. It becomes like a reality show, and if you start watching it, you become connected to the family and main characters involved, and want to hear all the gossip involved with them. Gossip might be an important aspect of society for increasing your happiness, but you probably should deal more with people who you interact with, rather than substituting by watching TV.
The second way the news tries to increase their profits is by spreading FUD – fear, uncertainty, and doubt. When people are afraid of something, they are more likely to want to gain more details about it. This happens with political events, economic conditions, and many others. I wouldn’t be suprised if the media could cause the economy to collapse by overreporting about economic problems, and hinting that they could get worse.
Thirdly, online news and newspapers suffer from the advertising problem. Advertisers want people to pay attention to their advertisements, so they make them bigger and flashier. This increases the readers desire to ignore the ads because they are annoying. The effectiveness of ads will decrease, so news sources will increase the number of ads, or size to make them harder to ignore. This results in very low signal to noise ratios, and very annoying ads.
Additionally, there are several other problems with news. They are clearly biased, spreading misinformation to many viewers who blindly follow them. (They don’t necessarily lie, but they overreport on some things, and underreport on the opposite sides sometimes.). The information you gain from them quickly expires, so you could do something more important with your time and not notice any problem with a lack of knowledge of current events. If ever there is a piece of information that is critical to you, it will be relayed to you because people will naturally talk about the really big events, or locally important events.
Humans have a natural tendency to want to stay informed as much as possible, so it may be frustrating to try to ignore news completely. We should probably try to ignore news as much as possible though, because so little of it is actually useful.
I know I like the easily digestable articles, especially about technical and scientific subjects. They can be fun to read because you think you are getting smarter without too much effort. It would be nice if as part of the spicy lifestyle academy, we published easilly digestable articles that were more informative – you actually could learn things from them.