5 ms·

I was recently listening to a podcast recapping a television show set in the early 2000s, where a current college aged student basically said "I wish I had the

by sylens 3y ago

I was recently listening to a podcast recapping a television show set in the early 2000s, where a current college aged student basically said "I wish I had the experience of being a teenager in that time period - it seemed much simpler as you weren't aware of every bad thing that was happening around the world" And that's really the way it used to be. It was even better before 24 hour news networks, as your evening news would give you the stories of the day, and then you would buy the next morning's newspaper if you wanted to read about it more in depth. Sometimes multiple newspapers if it's a topic you really wanted to sink your teeth into. There was no need to follow the result of every individual rocket volley in the Ukraine or each individual comment from a politician. As more people turn away from the news, it seems that they rely on their own smaller, informal communities to filter and signal boost the topics they really should pay attention to. Articles that get shared in a Discord catch my attention more than anything on Drudge or even Hacker News.

starttoaster 3y ago
> There was no need to follow the result of every individual rocket volley in the Ukraine or each individual comment from a politician. This is really it. Who has the time or the emotional bandwidth to spare for following all of this? I was talking to somebody about the overturning of affirmative action, and their response to me was basically "if you haven't read the Supreme Court opinions on this matter, we can't have a real conversation about this." That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long. I need to read multiple news articles and then a novel just to have an opinion on something now? That's cool, I just won't then.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  I wonder if they meant that you need a deeper understanding to have a meaningful conversation. Talking about what "the news" presents to you only scratches the surface and only covers what "the news" wants you to pay attention to. In that sense, only consuming "the news" could be considered a waste of time.
- tekla 3y ago
  > That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long. I need to read multiple news articles and then a novel just to have an opinion on something now? That's cool, I just won't then. It's incredibly hard to have a conversation on a complex legal document if you do not read the legal document.
  - JimtheCoder 3y ago
    "It's incredibly hard to have a conversation on a complex legal document if you do not read the legal document." On HN, not only is it easy, it's standard operating procedure... /s, but not really...
    - gnarlynarwhal42 3y ago
      "nuance" and "exactness" may be decreased, but the ideas remain true
  - starttoaster 3y ago
    You're absolutely right. However, we're not lawyers discussing law. We're random people that play video games discussing personal opinions in an informal setting. The point is we're getting hose fed "news stories" and I'm one mere person with a wife who I give much of my attention to, a job that I probably work more than my 40 hour share of a week at, hobbies that take more of my time, etc. Do you think it's reasonable to expect everyone with an opinion to have read a 237 page opinion piece on supremecourt.gov? Much more likely we're reading some editor's cut to speed along the process of absorbing enough information to be dangerous. I think it's fair to point out I might be missing some nuance of a judge's opinion because I didn't read their individual 45 page opinion, but in about 10 minutes I'm going to be reading a news story about China launching a real Death Star into orbit, and I need to get my brain ready to consume knowledge on that one, and then in about 25 minutes I'll be reading about covid-23.
  - koube 3y ago
    Lawmakers don't even read the bills the vote on, they have legal experts explain the implications to them. Would you have a better understanding of a system if you skimmed the source code or if you watched a presentation from the author? 237 pages of legalese is way beyond what most people can handle, this is why lawyers exist. If you're saying people shouldn't have an opinion unless they read complex legal documents you're just saying you don't think people should have opinions.
- chmod600 3y ago
  "That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long." That's not comparable to a book. The organization of an opinion is quite good and you can get a quick sense of what the arguments are even if you skip a bunch of stuff. When you find a claim that you don't agree with, dig into that a bit more and see why they say that.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    Moreover, the PDF of an opinion usually includes the actual opinion, and all the concurring and dissenting opinions, in a single document, so the actual opinion is usually much smaller than the whole PDF. (While reading the concurring and dissenting opinions may be useful, they are, in effect, other important people’s opinions on the opinion, and not necessary to have an basic informed opinion on the opinion.)
- digging 3y ago
  > I need to read multiple news articles and then a novel just to have an opinion on something now? Yes. Why do you want to have opinions on things you don't understand?
  - twelve40 3y ago
    well, this is how real life works. This is how popular vote works. 99% of voters will never read any of that crap (maaaybe just the tldr from the news) but will happily opine, and popular vote is based on that. so not exactly uncommon.
    - vasco 3y ago
      Osho had some deep thoughts about this, best summarized in these 30 seconds: https://youtu.be/QFgcqB8-AxE https://youtu.be/QFgcqB8-AxE
      - twelve40 3y ago
        he's not wrong, what can i say
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > 99% of voters will never read any of that crap Yes, and they are entitled to a vote that gets aggregated with others on the issues and candidates subject to public elections. That’s different from them having an opinion that is worth listening to individually.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
JimtheCoder 3y ago
"I was recently listening to a podcast recapping a television show set in the early 2000s, where a current college aged student basically said "I wish I had the experience of being a teenager in that time period - it seemed much simpler as you weren't aware of every bad thing that was happening around the world" I'm sad that kids these days did not get to experience things like the Sopranos, otherwise known as the best TV series ever. One hour. Once per week. No binge watching.
awelxtr 3y ago
This is the reason I receive every morning a notification with a link to the pdf version of a newspaper: to get an abridged recap of news like in the old times. Sometimes to keep your sanity you need help from others.
tgv 3y ago
> it seemed much simpler as you weren't aware of every bad thing that was happening around the world I strongly disagree with that. I wasn't exactly a teenager back then (past 30 already), but in the 80s and 90s, news papers over here informed you about happenings in the entire world, and social developments in my own country, and neighboring countries (what you exactly got depended on the news paper, as they ranged from populist-conservative to communist; news could be rather biased). I sometimes read the NY Times in that period as well, and it had a huge coverage of world events. Their Saturday edition was no joke, so it wasn't just a European thing. However, what you didn't read was: American boy assaults someone, twitter is outraged. American celebrity did/said something stupid 10 years ago, twitter explodes! American police officer hurts poor person, twitter has a stroke!! And that 10 times per day. All that online clickbait was missing, and rightly so. I don't care what some idiot does 6000km far from my home. If they start forming a threatening political movement, then I'd like to be informed. The quality of journalism has degraded considerably since then. There is too much attention to personal stories, either sobbing or ecstatic, never in between, and almost always with an implicit political agenda. Some of that is good, because it makes the abstract policies and distant wars relatable, but it has overtaken the hard news. Even national politics has largely disappeared from the news paper. Only when some politician is accused of intimidating behavior it gets back in the limelight. And that's why I am ignoring the news more and more. Not because it informs you too much about the bad in the world, but because it informs you about trivia, and lacks the things that really matter. Journalism has made itself irrelevant.
- tracker1 3y ago
  That assumes you even read the newspaper... when I was a kid, I had a paper route for a couple years. Only about 1/3 of houses got the paper, and not everyone even read it every day. Often only a couple cover articles, and maybe the 5pm or 10/11pm news. It was a relatively narrow window into only the most pressing issues of a given day. Today, you look at twitter and see a massive range of news from populist minutia of what a celebrity said/wore, or every single military engagement in Ukraine. The gulf war in Iraq was probably the first 24/7 news cycle engagement in human history for any significant number of people. I also agree on quality degradation. There is both more editorialization and lower quality writing all around. In addition to personal narratives all around.
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
The issue is that political aspects of the news are simply too entrenched at this point. My mechanism for changing it used to be my single vote (that's useless), but the other was expressing views with people I knew to change how they think on things. But nobody listens, or it's drowned out, or I don't even get to talk to people with other views, or nobody is undecided anymore. I'll try to avoid being political here with Trump. Trump was a deconstruction of old guard media and the illusions they put up with the political process. He reduced political campaigning to almost pure media events and games, with almost no substance for the right or the left (except outrage or adulation). As part of that, old media like CNN that tries to keep the trappings of authoritative news delivery have been thoroughly "pantsed". Everyone knows you are stupid if you accept what newspeople tell you at face value (unless they are telling you things you already agree with emotionally). I'd like to note, I view myself primarily as a environmentalist, and the corollary to that is I feel I have no political party. The right is outright hostile to it, the left is duplicitous and non-supportive of it. Social media has corralled everyone into echo chambers, and then added a massive amount of cacophony to drown out any real conversation. But practically everyone is dealing with this for whatever they care about. Social media has highlighted how little we can do, yet amped up the education about a lot of shadow stuff that used to be completely hidden. Anyway, now I watch sports "news" and let the social stuff bleed in. The real question is if the internet has made people smarter as a whole. I believe the internet of the last 30 years has made almost everyone smarter. What will the next 30 years look like? But it took 30 years for non-internet corporations and governments/politicians to "figure out" the internet on a fundamental level. IMO the Trump election was the first example of that. Control and corralling of information with echo chambers has changed things.
linster 3y ago
In summary: life was better in the 90s because you were unaware. Cue oddly specific example of “The Ukraine” and “rocket volley”. Next, the highlight that informal communities that make their own echo chambers are more popular as distrust in established media is sown. Finally, a personal anecdote that echo chambers curate more attention-getting articles. Nothing in this post is especially truthy or falsey, yet it serves up mild “distrust the media” nihilism.
- shortcake27 3y ago
  Yes, my elderly mother can’t stop complaining about how much crime there is “these days”. Despite the fact crime per-capita has decreased, the news reports the absolute value. This in turn tricks people into believing something that is quite literally opposite from what is really happening.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Yes, my elderly mother can’t stop complaining about how much crime there is “these days”. Despite the fact crime per-capita has decreased, the news reports the absolute value. This in turn tricks people into believing something that is quite literally opposite from what is really happening. This has been true consistently since the major drop in crime rates in the 1990s. (And it was true for particular kinds of crime that were declining well before that.) This isn’t a new effect of todays news that differs from decades past: “if it bleeds, it leads” and the effect that has is much older.
    - s1artibartfast 3y ago
      I haven't seen a good analysis that includes urbanization and human migration. It can be simultaneously true that Urban crime rates have declined while average crime experienced by people has increased. If Grandma grew up in a rural setting with a low property crime rate, and I was in a big city with a higher crime rate, the crime in their environment has gone up even if the city's crime rate is going down. The same may be true for the average American due to the net increase in urbanization.
bcoates 3y ago
Uh, early 2000s? There was very much 24/7 news media back then. Mature internet news, immature social media, multiple 24/7 national news channels for most major countries and languages... I daresay most teens in the early 2000s were aware of such minor news events as Sept. 11 and the subsequent decade of global war. Your stereotypical Millennial news junkie that the Wapo is crying about moving on with their lives was minted in this era of hyper-pervasive media. Note that the actual non-news media of the early 2000s, and the period pieces that remake it, mostly ignore this reality and are culturally set a decade or more earlier. This is a sort of 'the Simpsons' effect where creators in their 30s and 40s who don't realize how much the world has changed produce media about their childhood set in the present.
- sylens 3y ago
  I recognize there was 24/7 news media then, but it was still better than now. And before there was 24/7 news media was even better than the early 2000s
  - wildrhythms 3y ago
    Kindly define 'better'. News in the early 2000s, the 1990s, the 1980s, ... was all just as commercialized, propagandized, and partisan as it is today. I think the difference that in the early 2000s the breadth of 'news' didn't include all of the micro niches and pointless internet celebrity drama that seems to infect everything everywhere today. Also in the early 2000s there wasn't the hyper addictive social networks demanding your attention on 'news' that is ultimately manufactured for views and clicks that we have today.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      When people yearn for the yesteryear of mass market propaganda it just means they yearn for when they didn’t know it was propaganda, and didn’t realize that a world where their side does everything right is a world that only exists in the propagandist’s mind.
    - sylens 3y ago

by sylens 3y ago

starttoaster 3y ago

> There was no need to follow the result of every individual rocket volley in the Ukraine or each individual comment from a politician. This is really it. Who has the time or the emotional bandwidth to spare for following all of this? I was talking to somebody about the overturning of affirmative action, and their response to me was basically "if you haven't read the Supreme Court opinions on this matter, we can't have a real conversation about this." That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long. I need to read multiple news articles and then a novel just to have an opinion on something now? That's cool, I just won't then.

barbazoo 3y ago
I wonder if they meant that you need a deeper understanding to have a meaningful conversation. Talking about what "the news" presents to you only scratches the surface and only covers what "the news" wants you to pay attention to. In that sense, only consuming "the news" could be considered a waste of time.
tekla 3y ago
> That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long. I need to read multiple news articles and then a novel just to have an opinion on something now? That's cool, I just won't then. It's incredibly hard to have a conversation on a complex legal document if you do not read the legal document.
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  "It's incredibly hard to have a conversation on a complex legal document if you do not read the legal document." On HN, not only is it easy, it's standard operating procedure... /s, but not really...
  - gnarlynarwhal42 3y ago
    "nuance" and "exactness" may be decreased, but the ideas remain true
- starttoaster 3y ago
  You're absolutely right. However, we're not lawyers discussing law. We're random people that play video games discussing personal opinions in an informal setting. The point is we're getting hose fed "news stories" and I'm one mere person with a wife who I give much of my attention to, a job that I probably work more than my 40 hour share of a week at, hobbies that take more of my time, etc. Do you think it's reasonable to expect everyone with an opinion to have read a 237 page opinion piece on supremecourt.gov? Much more likely we're reading some editor's cut to speed along the process of absorbing enough information to be dangerous. I think it's fair to point out I might be missing some nuance of a judge's opinion because I didn't read their individual 45 page opinion, but in about 10 minutes I'm going to be reading a news story about China launching a real Death Star into orbit, and I need to get my brain ready to consume knowledge on that one, and then in about 25 minutes I'll be reading about covid-23.
- koube 3y ago
  Lawmakers don't even read the bills the vote on, they have legal experts explain the implications to them. Would you have a better understanding of a system if you skimmed the source code or if you watched a presentation from the author? 237 pages of legalese is way beyond what most people can handle, this is why lawyers exist. If you're saying people shouldn't have an opinion unless they read complex legal documents you're just saying you don't think people should have opinions.
chmod600 3y ago
"That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long." That's not comparable to a book. The organization of an opinion is quite good and you can get a quick sense of what the arguments are even if you skip a bunch of stuff. When you find a claim that you don't agree with, dig into that a bit more and see why they say that.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  Moreover, the PDF of an opinion usually includes the actual opinion, and all the concurring and dissenting opinions, in a single document, so the actual opinion is usually much smaller than the whole PDF. (While reading the concurring and dissenting opinions may be useful, they are, in effect, other important people’s opinions on the opinion, and not necessary to have an basic informed opinion on the opinion.)
digging 3y ago
> I need to read multiple news articles and then a novel just to have an opinion on something now? Yes. Why do you want to have opinions on things you don't understand?
- twelve40 3y ago
  well, this is how real life works. This is how popular vote works. 99% of voters will never read any of that crap (maaaybe just the tldr from the news) but will happily opine, and popular vote is based on that. so not exactly uncommon.
  - vasco 3y ago
    Osho had some deep thoughts about this, best summarized in these 30 seconds: https://youtu.be/QFgcqB8-AxE https://youtu.be/QFgcqB8-AxE
    - twelve40 3y ago
      he's not wrong, what can i say
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > 99% of voters will never read any of that crap Yes, and they are entitled to a vote that gets aggregated with others on the issues and candidates subject to public elections. That’s different from them having an opinion that is worth listening to individually.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

JimtheCoder 3y ago

"I was recently listening to a podcast recapping a television show set in the early 2000s, where a current college aged student basically said "I wish I had the experience of being a teenager in that time period - it seemed much simpler as you weren't aware of every bad thing that was happening around the world" I'm sad that kids these days did not get to experience things like the Sopranos, otherwise known as the best TV series ever. One hour. Once per week. No binge watching.

awelxtr 3y ago

This is the reason I receive every morning a notification with a link to the pdf version of a newspaper: to get an abridged recap of news like in the old times. Sometimes to keep your sanity you need help from others.

tgv 3y ago

> it seemed much simpler as you weren't aware of every bad thing that was happening around the world I strongly disagree with that. I wasn't exactly a teenager back then (past 30 already), but in the 80s and 90s, news papers over here informed you about happenings in the entire world, and social developments in my own country, and neighboring countries (what you exactly got depended on the news paper, as they ranged from populist-conservative to communist; news could be rather biased). I sometimes read the NY Times in that period as well, and it had a huge coverage of world events. Their Saturday edition was no joke, so it wasn't just a European thing. However, what you didn't read was: American boy assaults someone, twitter is outraged. American celebrity did/said something stupid 10 years ago, twitter explodes! American police officer hurts poor person, twitter has a stroke!! And that 10 times per day. All that online clickbait was missing, and rightly so. I don't care what some idiot does 6000km far from my home. If they start forming a threatening political movement, then I'd like to be informed. The quality of journalism has degraded considerably since then. There is too much attention to personal stories, either sobbing or ecstatic, never in between, and almost always with an implicit political agenda. Some of that is good, because it makes the abstract policies and distant wars relatable, but it has overtaken the hard news. Even national politics has largely disappeared from the news paper. Only when some politician is accused of intimidating behavior it gets back in the limelight. And that's why I am ignoring the news more and more. Not because it informs you too much about the bad in the world, but because it informs you about trivia, and lacks the things that really matter. Journalism has made itself irrelevant.

tracker1 3y ago
That assumes you even read the newspaper... when I was a kid, I had a paper route for a couple years. Only about 1/3 of houses got the paper, and not everyone even read it every day. Often only a couple cover articles, and maybe the 5pm or 10/11pm news. It was a relatively narrow window into only the most pressing issues of a given day. Today, you look at twitter and see a massive range of news from populist minutia of what a celebrity said/wore, or every single military engagement in Ukraine. The gulf war in Iraq was probably the first 24/7 news cycle engagement in human history for any significant number of people. I also agree on quality degradation. There is both more editorialization and lower quality writing all around. In addition to personal narratives all around.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

The issue is that political aspects of the news are simply too entrenched at this point. My mechanism for changing it used to be my single vote (that's useless), but the other was expressing views with people I knew to change how they think on things. But nobody listens, or it's drowned out, or I don't even get to talk to people with other views, or nobody is undecided anymore. I'll try to avoid being political here with Trump. Trump was a deconstruction of old guard media and the illusions they put up with the political process. He reduced political campaigning to almost pure media events and games, with almost no substance for the right or the left (except outrage or adulation). As part of that, old media like CNN that tries to keep the trappings of authoritative news delivery have been thoroughly "pantsed". Everyone knows you are stupid if you accept what newspeople tell you at face value (unless they are telling you things you already agree with emotionally). I'd like to note, I view myself primarily as a environmentalist, and the corollary to that is I feel I have no political party. The right is outright hostile to it, the left is duplicitous and non-supportive of it. Social media has corralled everyone into echo chambers, and then added a massive amount of cacophony to drown out any real conversation. But practically everyone is dealing with this for whatever they care about. Social media has highlighted how little we can do, yet amped up the education about a lot of shadow stuff that used to be completely hidden. Anyway, now I watch sports "news" and let the social stuff bleed in. The real question is if the internet has made people smarter as a whole. I believe the internet of the last 30 years has made almost everyone smarter. What will the next 30 years look like? But it took 30 years for non-internet corporations and governments/politicians to "figure out" the internet on a fundamental level. IMO the Trump election was the first example of that. Control and corralling of information with echo chambers has changed things.

linster 3y ago

In summary: life was better in the 90s because you were unaware. Cue oddly specific example of “The Ukraine” and “rocket volley”. Next, the highlight that informal communities that make their own echo chambers are more popular as distrust in established media is sown. Finally, a personal anecdote that echo chambers curate more attention-getting articles. Nothing in this post is especially truthy or falsey, yet it serves up mild “distrust the media” nihilism.

shortcake27 3y ago
Yes, my elderly mother can’t stop complaining about how much crime there is “these days”. Despite the fact crime per-capita has decreased, the news reports the absolute value. This in turn tricks people into believing something that is quite literally opposite from what is really happening.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Yes, my elderly mother can’t stop complaining about how much crime there is “these days”. Despite the fact crime per-capita has decreased, the news reports the absolute value. This in turn tricks people into believing something that is quite literally opposite from what is really happening. This has been true consistently since the major drop in crime rates in the 1990s. (And it was true for particular kinds of crime that were declining well before that.) This isn’t a new effect of todays news that differs from decades past: “if it bleeds, it leads” and the effect that has is much older.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    I haven't seen a good analysis that includes urbanization and human migration. It can be simultaneously true that Urban crime rates have declined while average crime experienced by people has increased. If Grandma grew up in a rural setting with a low property crime rate, and I was in a big city with a higher crime rate, the crime in their environment has gone up even if the city's crime rate is going down. The same may be true for the average American due to the net increase in urbanization.

bcoates 3y ago

Uh, early 2000s? There was very much 24/7 news media back then. Mature internet news, immature social media, multiple 24/7 national news channels for most major countries and languages... I daresay most teens in the early 2000s were aware of such minor news events as Sept. 11 and the subsequent decade of global war. Your stereotypical Millennial news junkie that the Wapo is crying about moving on with their lives was minted in this era of hyper-pervasive media. Note that the actual non-news media of the early 2000s, and the period pieces that remake it, mostly ignore this reality and are culturally set a decade or more earlier. This is a sort of 'the Simpsons' effect where creators in their 30s and 40s who don't realize how much the world has changed produce media about their childhood set in the present.

sylens 3y ago
I recognize there was 24/7 news media then, but it was still better than now. And before there was 24/7 news media was even better than the early 2000s
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  Kindly define 'better'. News in the early 2000s, the 1990s, the 1980s, ... was all just as commercialized, propagandized, and partisan as it is today. I think the difference that in the early 2000s the breadth of 'news' didn't include all of the micro niches and pointless internet celebrity drama that seems to infect everything everywhere today. Also in the early 2000s there wasn't the hyper addictive social networks demanding your attention on 'news' that is ultimately manufactured for views and clicks that we have today.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    When people yearn for the yesteryear of mass market propaganda it just means they yearn for when they didn’t know it was propaganda, and didn’t realize that a world where their side does everything right is a world that only exists in the propagandist’s mind.
  - sylens 3y ago