What are people's strategy's for consuming news?

I kind of ratchetted down my news consumtpion to near zero back in early december, as kind of a necessity. Every part of the news cycle even from my more favored news cycles just feels very bleak and very samey all the time; and it was really impacting me on an emotional level.

I’ve mentioned on Mastodon somewhat recently. I feel like the news cycle for american politics for the next year feels a bit predestined. In that we know what the big moves and shakeups are likely to be, and short of knowing outcomes of the 2020 election we pretty much know what a lot of 2020 is going to look like politicaly, pretty far in advance.

I feel more than a little bit irresponsible though just declaring the news cycle as bleak and meaningless, and tuning it out this long.

Curious to know how other people manage this. Though I suspect @maiki depends largely on his social graph to keep him up to date, if I recall correctly.

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Yep. But I started this over a decade ago. Simple observation: all the things I care about that can affect me directly also affect those around me; that’s pretty much the “news”. I only need to know a dog bit someone if I also know someone (or the dog :thinking:).

But I also make sure to report back here and other places when I learn something, so it’s a give and take.

Also, I’m ever after a news feed that doesn’t suck. If news feeds didn’t suck multidimensionally, I’d probably read news more. ;p

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My main intake of news is OPB during the 20 minute drive to work. They usually cover morning topics about Oregon and Portland, followed by BBC Topline which gives me an overview of global stories. I personally feel like this is enough to keep me generally informed, but if a story interests me I’ll usually spend some time doing some googling around it. I’ve always felt like listening to the news doesn’t stress me out, nor does skimming twitter headlines and hot takes. I think the only thing global-eventish is that the sound of low-flying airplanes kind of freaks me out, which sucks when you live across a flat suburban plain from an international airport.

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Do you ever see Red Dawn? What did you think?

Just thought id share ive still not figured out my own satisfactory answer to this; but im also firmly of the opinion that I haven’t missed much when I do tune in.

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Let’s zoom out: the reason I practice news reading as I do is because I am human.

As a human, and despite the extra feat at birth, I’m particularly susceptible to extra-planar manipulation and I get distracted easily.

The non-D&D version is: as a human I get easily distracted.

Turns out my ancestors had less news to read and more hunting around tougher, less intelligent animals. Our distractibility is the cost of our cognitive powers.

That’s the base logic behind my decision. For the instance of human that is maiki, there are other rules, routines and such, for the individual instance. But as far as I know, there is no human wired to digest information from multiple abstract sources and produce useful results.

I don’t know if we live in the age of anxiety. It feels like that, but then I don’t kbow what its like to have the gods blow up our nearby mountain or punish us with plagues; maybe anxiety is just a societal knob… regardless, if we can regulate societal anxiety, even over long arcs, we ought to make the effort to reduce anxiety.

Unless we need anxiety to break something. But that case won’t be televised.

That said, I’d like just a simple RSS reader I don’t hate, and I can’t even find that, so I can’t discount I’m… oh, just get off my lawn! :stuck_out_tongue: