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afterdo--- SUCCEEDING IN A WORLD OF INFORMATION ABUNDANCE ---
If you serve as a mechanical slave to mass media and online algorithms, you’ll end up with intellectual diabetes. To find quality information, you have to rebel against the incentives of mass media and the algorithms that threaten its business model.
To be clear, I don’t think we should stop reading the news entirely. As a society, we can spend less energy following the news and become more informed about our society. The act of reading the news carries symbolic weight. People in power won’t fear the pain of a journalist’s bite unless the news maintains its legitimacy. Likewise, even if reading the news isn’t an efficient way to learn about the world, the news industrial complex might be a necessary inefficiency in society. Even if the societal positives of reading the news are mostly symbolic, doing so increases the legitimacy of the fourth estate. But today, the pendulum of human attention has swung too far in the direction of compulsive consumption of superficial news. A large percentage of the time we currently spend consuming news would be better spent reading the work of independent researchers or following writers on Substack.
If you serve as a mechanical slave to mass media and online algorithms, you’ll end up with intellectual diabetes. To find quality information, you have to rebel against the incentives of mass media and the algorithms that threaten its business model.
To be clear, I don’t think we should stop reading the news entirely. As a society, we can spend less energy following the news and become more informed about our society. The act of reading the news carries symbolic weight. People in power won’t fear the pain of a journalist’s bite unless the news maintains its legitimacy. Likewise, even if reading the news isn’t an efficient way to learn about the world, the news industrial complex might be a necessary inefficiency in society. Even if the societal positives of reading the news are mostly symbolic, doing so increases the legitimacy of the fourth estate. But today, the pendulum of human attention has swung too far in the direction of compulsive consumption of superficial news. A large percentage of the time we currently spend consuming news would be better spent reading the work of independent researchers or following writers on Substack.
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