Media Analyst: Reading the News is Futile (Andrew)

As a subscriber to two newspapers and multiple magazines who is fast reaching his dotage (I am almost 36), I often have conversations with people in their twenties who laugh at my "affectation" of reading print, when almost everything is available online for free, instantaneously.  As the saying went in the 90s, "the information just wants to be free." My lawyer wife points out the absurdity of this, of assuming that a news article or radio or video feature "wants" to be given away for less than it cost to produce.  As she put it, can you imagine a grocery store with the slogan "the food just wants to be free"?

But the techno-Pollyanna argument continues that by the time the newspapers arrive on my doorstep at 4:30 AM, the "digital natives" have already read everything interesting the night before. 

But there is a counter-argument to that too, that living suffused in a perpetually updating news cycle precludes the ability to think or synthesize what we've learned.  Instead of digesting and mulling over, say, the issues and disagreements at the nuclear summit, we're instead bombarded with the next 150 stories of the day.  There's a reason that philosophers and other serious thinkers lock themselves in quiet rooms.

There's even an argument that the news is useless, a distraction from the hard work of living our actual life.  I'm not willing to go that far, but in some moods I do find the position appealing.  Here's a distillation of the position from media critic Henry Thoreau, who I think is some kind of unpaid intern at the NRDC:

And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter — we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip.

Comments

[Ruchira]

Okay, I HAVE reached my dotage and I may also qualify as an old woman who reads newspapers over her tea.

But I also happen to be a fairly web-savvy "old woman" who goes to sleep late and does glance over all the breaking news before going to bed. So, it is true that I often already know the next update in many a news story that appears in my morning newspaper (which is getting slimmer by the month) when I wake up. But I still have to read a "real" paper over my morning toast. I don't know why. Helps digest the toast? Or does print go over well with a steaming cup of tea / coffee? Even in hotel rooms with 24 hour cable news access, I ask the front desk for a copy of the morning paper which more often than not turns out to be the popular rag USA Today.

Uh, Andrew. Who says that philosophers lock themselves up in quiet rooms? They are all over the blogs and Facebook ... yakking about the latest breaking news / gossip!

[Sujatha]

And here I was seriously considering stopping my subscription to the local paper. After all, it's all stale news that I've already read on the internet the night before. Why do I stick to it, when there are days that it goes straight from the bag to the 'old newspaper' pile, I don't know.
Our local freebie paper is a right-leaning compedia of tired exhortations-of-the-week against the Terrible Ob. But it charms with all the local fresh-faces arrayed in front of their Eagle scout project, the hugely entertaining letters to the editor that you can put a face to (some may be your neighbors), the heart-warming tale of community fundraisers to pay for exotic medical conditions in some adorable tyke with smiles that would melt the Grim Reaper, the page long obituaries (I could write a whole blog post on those, they're my secret vice)...
I admit it, I love to collect stories, human or otherwise, the anti-Thoreauvian, if you will. We outnumber him vastly, and make no pretensions to being philosophers in need of quiet rooms to do our thinking. ( I think any mom who has learned to tune out screaming toddlers has an advantage in learning to philosophize without the benefit of absolute peace and quiet.)

[Andrew Rosenblum]

@Ruchira -- I agree that the "user experience," as the digital natives call it, of the morning paper blows news on the web out of the water. To use the terms adopted by a print trade group, print is "immersive" while the Internet is "impulsive." And sorry about Thoreau's "old women" over the tea -- we all know that men of all ages can be just as inane or gossipy as women -- just tune into sports radio sometime!

But to Ruchira and Sujatha, I do think there's something to the argument that the Internet is a big distraction. If circumstances, like a screaming baby, intrude, that's one thing. But this thus far childless fellow needed to disconnect his Internet for a couple of hours today to really concentrate on the necessary drudgery of transcribing a technical interview about brain simulation. With the Internet a click away, I kept wanting to click over to ESPN or the Times -- but with it off, I actually got my work done. I have no doubt that philosophers and other people are just as prone to wanting to chatter on blogs -- but I'd still guess that their best work takes place in isolation or whatever other situation is conducive to intense concentration.

And lastly, Sujatha, I fully agree that the "local color" stories are some of my favorites. (Even though here in California, they are often quite grisly -- for instance, the Riverside ex-con who killed his pen pal/lover and stashed the body in a cement and chicken wire "egg" in his yard, which was later discovered by a neighbor who hoped there might be cash or jewels inside with which he could make off): http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/sdcounty/article_3a941d04-6b89-5daf-97c9-50ebb43acf71.html

[Ruchira]

Being seduced by distractions and titillations is the problem of the human brain. We just have more tools around now that vie for our attention round the clock. To shut them out or not, is our choice. Let's not blame the tools. It would be as much of a lame thing to say "the brain just wants to be distracted," as it is to say, "the news just wants to be free." It is up to us to make time for quiet contemplation. Let's train our children to meditate during gym along with teaching them to run, jump and climb rope.

We are going to turn to whatever means are available to us to get more of what we want. That's the average human nature. I had heard of surgeons, a decade or two ago, who used to come out of the surgery and start calling their stock brokers from hall phones even before they had changed out of their surgical scrubs. Made you wonder where their minds were when they were cutting open the patients to peer at their interiors. Now they just rush to their computers for the latest news from Wall Street. My friends and I routinely smuggled transistor radios to the class room (a banned item in our school) to keep abreast of the latest score when India played "cricket test matches" against other international teams. Reading a detective novel (or something else that caught our fancy) under the desk during math and social studies? Who among us has not done it when the opportunity was there? And when nothing is available as a tangible distraction, how about staring out of the window during a particularly tedious lecture? We can be distracted all the time even when no technology is available to tempt us. The area where we are woefully failing is that we no longer train ourselves to focus in a formal and deliberate way, as did students and apprentices a couple of centuries ago. We have forgotten the art of controlling our brains from the inside and blaming it on the outside world.

[Dean C. Rowan]

"Information wants to be free" is a euphemism for "talk is cheap." But it's reductive to regard good work by good journalists--rare commodities--as mere information. There's news (gossip, speculation, innuendo, repetition, titillation) and there's news (can't think of a good example at the moment, but you and even Thoreau know what I mean). The problem, of course, is how to distinguish the two and then to choose the latter for one's distraction and, in its more robust connotation, information.

I think blaming the tools is fair. (No surprise there.) It's not simply a matter of our needing to learn to use the right tools in the right way for the appropriate project, although that is an enduring principle to abide by. The innovators, the tools who design and peddle the tools purportedly in anticipation of our "needs," have incorporated distraction as an insidious feature. The NYT site recently began introducing a pop-up headline when you reach the end of a story. It sidles in from the bottom corner of the screen and highlights what must automatically be deemed a related story. But it usually isn't, and the feature is just an irritant. Rather than serve a need, it creates one. If we don't criticize the tools as well as the stream of inane data they transmit we will have acquiesced to the status quo.

[Jon Johanning]

My wife and I enjoy reading the dead tree NY Times on Sunday mornings, but otherwise I get all my news on the Internet these days. And when the Times starts its paywall, I'll give up the Times on line. There is just so much information on the Internet that it's like drinking from a fire hose, and so far at least, very few people spewing it out there are charging. So it's not so much that information wants to be free as that information *is* free, for the time being, so why not take advantage of it?

And I agree that it's up to us to learn how to take sips from this fire hose without injuring ourselves. My work involves constantly using Google and other such resources for research all day long, so I can't shut myself off from it. I just have to discipline myself not to waste time "surfing," though that can be tempting. And when I am looking at something like the Times site, I just ignore stuff like those "related story" thingies which, I agree, are almost never relevant to what I want to know.

I sort of think of the Internet as an enormously chatty person sitting next to you on the bus who never shuts up. If it were a real person, you would want to slap them in the face, but you would inhibit the urge. Since the Internet is just a huge machine, it's not at all impolite to tell it just to shut up when you've had enough.

[Sujatha]

Having lost power and internet/cable over the weekend and having it restored only today, I found myself reading the paper for the 'news'. There was no other option. It felt strangely peaceful and lacking in the sense of immediacy brought by the internet/TV, to know of occurrences only several hours after they occurred.