A Weakness of the Information Age

by AllTimeJeff 18 Replies latest jw friends

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  Satanus

  When i got onto the net, i stopped listening to radio and tv news and stopped reading newspapers, science mags, etc. I got everything from the net. I binged on, learning about what i was interested in. As my thirst for knowledge and an undertsanding of how things in the world work was slacked, i basically stopped even reading about news. Life is much more contented without hearing/seeing the latest fearmongering and accounts of massacres, starvations and calamities from all over the world. That doesn't make me hardened, it just keeps me from feeling down from hearing negatives. Most of the world news has no connection to me, anyway.

  Basically, the internet and all it's accoutriments takes information control away from the talking heads and puts it into your hands. You pick and choose whom you read/listen to, how much and about what. You decide how much info you put out there. There's a learning curve involved in taking on the responsibility.

  S
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  AllTimeJeff

  What is fascinating to me is how blogs and social networking is affecting traditional news gathering.

  Clearly in a democracy, we cannot have the government do more then put out press releases. Even with the growth in news channels on TV and their related internet counterparts, there is a great deal of growth in internet websites not owned by network or cable news.

  The challenge is digging through it all, being able to search quotes in context via transcripts, and as you say Satanus, make up your own mind instead of trying to find the truth somewhere between Fox and MSNBC.
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  JeffT

  The concept of the neutral jounalist came and went as a rather recent blip on the radar. It may come back, I don't know. In the early days of the newspapers they were blatantly partisan in some way shape or form. And generally the readers knew what the publishers views were, or could decern them quickly when reading an an unfamiliar paper.

  I think it was more honest, you knew where the author was coming from.
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  jwfacts

  However, with the capacity to have instant information, we seem to have bypassed filters that essentially were to ask: "Yes, this is information. Is it true? Is it relevant? Is it in context?"

  I don't think this is anything new. People have always bypassed the filters. In the past this was seen in the spreading of urban myths verbally or trashy newspapers. Before that the gullible believed in all the superstitions of simple religions. The only difference now is that incorrect information can be spread quicker, and people are subject to a lot more information, both accurate and inaccurate. The internet allows those with filters to find the truth about a matter more easily and those without filters to accept even more rubbish.
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  daniel-p

  The need to assimalate and meaningfully categorize so much more information means we will do less and less thinking about it, out of necessity. That's not a good thing, because well-rounded and deep thinking can only come through ponderance, and that king of thing doesn't happen in an age where everyone's attention span is reduced.

  In fact, its specifically why I have started subscriptions to some of my favorite magazines, and come that much closer to closing my home Internet connection.
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  daniel-p

  What is fascinating to me is how blogs and social networking is affecting traditional news gathering.

  The problem is that most of it does not seem to be news gathering, but news repeating and commenting. Instead of a world of more news gatherers and makers, we have an endless and poor-quality supply of pundits propigating cheap sentiments and opinions and offering the lamest of platitudes to as quickly assign or categorize such news its proper prejudicial place.You're right, the world is smaller with the Internet; but ideas are also smaller, and imaginations smaller, as everyone imitates each other into a daisy-chain of cheap cultural references.

  One well-read issue of Harpers will give you more worth-while thinking than three months worth of Internet clicking.
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  BurnTheShips

  The problem is that most of it does not seem to be news gathering, but news repeating and commenting.

  The old line media is dropping the ball on the ClimateGate story.

  What Story? [Mark Steyn]

  Michael Gerson has lousy timing. In The Washington Post, in one of those now familiar elegies for old media, he writes:

  And the whole system is based on a kind of intellectual theft. Internet aggregators (who link to news they don't produce) and bloggers would have little to collect or comment upon without the costly enterprise of newsgathering and investigative reporting. The old-media dinosaurs remain the basis for the entire media food chain.

  That's laughably untrue in the Warmergate story. If you rely on the lavishly remunerated "climate correspondents" of the big newspapers and networks, you'll know nothing about the Climate Research Unit scandals - just the business-as-usual drivel about Boston being underwater by 2011. Indeed, even when a prominent media warm-monger addresses the issue, the newspaper prefers to reprint a month-old column predating the scandal. If you follow online analysis from obscure websites on the fringes of the map, you'll know what's going on. If you go to the convenience store and buy today's newspaper, you won't. That's the problem.

  If anyone needs newspapers, it ought to be for stories like this. If there were no impending epocalypse, then "climate science" would be a relatively obscure field, as it was up to a generation ago. Now it produces celebrity scientists living high off the hog of billions in grants. They thus have a vested interest in maintaining the planet's-gonna-fry line. So what do the media do? Instead of exposing the thesis to rigorous journalistic examination, they stage fluffy green stunts, run soft-focus "living green" features with Hollywood "activists", and at a time of massive staff cutbacks in every other department create the positions of specialist "climate correspondent" and "environmental reporter" and fill them with sycophantic promoters of the Big Scare to the point that, as Dr Mann coos approvingly to The New York Times, "you've taken the words out of my mouth".

  What Gerson writes ought to be true. Warmergate demonstrates why it isn't.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sZx90EH8N8
• 

  RubaDub

  the Brinkley's, Cronkites, and Murrows ruled the world, now news organizations are known for the news personalities.

  In my mind, Fox News is best known for the legs of the females giving the news.

  Rub a Dub
• 

  greendawn

  I see nothing negative in the way the internet makes an abundance of news sources available in fact it is better because it helps you escape the traditional off line news venues which almost always manipulated news eg by leaving out those news that didn't fit in with their agenda thus presenting a very one sided view of issues. To be sure news were carefully filtered and chosen but presented in a cunning way that made one think they were undirected, unbiased and fairly presented.

  Those that understand English are in good luck because there are online newspapers from almost every country in the world giving in all a multitude of view points on important issues, in English, so it's much easier to understand what's really going on. For those that know additional languages so much the better. This breaking of the monopoly of traditional news media really began in the late 1980's with home satellite TV.

  And as someone said above not buying actual newspapers saves the trees as well as your money in fact when I first went online I soon realised that I was saving money, the monthly cost of internet as a news source (not counting all the other info) was less than the cost of the daily newspaper plus a couple of weekly magazines I used to buy in those times in a month.