I'm of the opinion that this sort of thing is not any different than reality TV highlights or celebrity news. It's all mostly useless information that feels goo

I'm of the opinion that this sort of thing is not any different than reality TV highlights or celebrity news. It's all mostly useless information that feels good going in but doesn't add much value int he end. Neil Postman touches on this in 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' - here's a nice quote that gets at how I feel. Although he's talking about the telegraph and photography, I think it applies well to the internet and video. "In a peculiar way, the photograph was the perfect complement to the flood of telegraphic news from nowhere that threatened to submerge readers in a sea of facts from unknown places about strangers with unknown faces. For the photograph gave a concrete reality to the strange-sounding datelines, and attached faces to the unknown names. Thus it provided the illusion, at least, that "the news" had a connection to something within one's sensory experience. It created an apparent context for the "news of the day." And the "news of the day" created a context for the photograph. But the sense of context created by the partnership of photograph and headline was, of course, entirely illusory. You may get a better sense of what I mean here if you imagine a stranger's informing you that the illyx is a subspecies of vero miform plant with articulated leaves that flowers biannually on the island of Aldononjes. And if you wonder aloud, "Yes, but what has that to do with anything?" imagine that your informant replies, "But here is a photograph I want you to see," and hands you a picture labeled Illyx on Aldononjes. "Ah, yes," you might murmur, "now I see." It is true enough that the photograph provides a context for the sentence you have been given, and that the sentence provides a context of sorts for the photograph, and you may even believe for a day or so that you have learned something. But if the event is entirely self-contained, devoid of any relationship to your past knowledge or future plans, if that is the beginning and end of your encounter with the stranger, then the appearance of context provided by the conjunction of sentence and image is illusory, and so is the impression of meaning attached to it. You will, in fact, have "learned" nothing (except perhaps to avoid strangers with photographs), and the illyx will fade from your mental landscape as though it had never been. At best you are left with an amusing bit of trivia, good for trading in cocktail party chatter or solving acrossword puzzle, but nothing more." https://quote.ucsd.edu/childhood/files/2013/05/postman-amusing.pdf https://quote.ucsd.edu/childhood/files/2013/05/postman-amusi...