8 ms·

How Millennials Get News

81 points by johnny99 12y ago

codemac 12y ago
The one part I can't believe is that 86% of people think they're "Usually [seeing] diverse opinions through social media". The "filter bubble" is going to get worse and worse, it seems. Has anyone had any good experiences where a piece of information technology (forum, reddit, twitter, insta, etc) didn't encourage a filter bubble?
- proksoup 12y ago
  Trolls cross the lines. "If you don't agree with the person who made this video why are you posting here?!?! Get a life troll!" Trolls is the heroes of the internet, the diversity.
  - angersock 12y ago
    The few, the proud, the unwilling to be quietly wrong in their own corner. You need us. :)
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - cbd1984 12y ago
      Nobody needs the people who harass others and attempt to ridicule them into silence.
      - angersock 12y ago
        Incorrect without further qualification. There are people in the set of "others" who very much deserve harassment and ridicule--consider people actively working against the common good, like Scientologists or other online trolls or robber barons or city bosses.
        cbd1984 12y ago
        Internet trolls are the people who dox others and drive them to suicide. We can achieve more without them than with them.
        proksoup 12y ago
        I suppose we both could have said "some" eh.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
  - cbd1984 12y ago
    Trolls are reinforcing the bubble by "proving" that everyone outside of it is purely an asshole with no intent to have a conversation, merely to insult and ridicule and try to cause people to leave the forum.
    - proksoup 12y ago
      The problem is the labeling of them as trolls, is what I meant. There is no such thing as trolls, that person you call a troll is making a joke or making a point and you're too far inside your own bubble to not call them an asshole.
      - cbd1984 12y ago
        No, the person who's harassing someone for being different isn't making a joke or a point. They're harassing someone for being different. People who try to make others commit suicide don't have a valid point.
        proksoup 12y ago
        Okay. I believe you. I'm not familiar with those. The sorts of things I've seen are more like Berta Lovejoy / Doritan Cheeto.
- lazaroclapp 12y ago
  Well, one thing to consider is that the "filter bubble" is relative, to a degree. We are talking about news, for a mainstream audience. So, the old fashioned alternative is perhaps reading a single physical newspaper, watching 1 or 2 tv news shows and perhaps listening to one radio station, all of similar political bent. Compared to that, the variance of view points among my Facebook friends is likely still higher, as is, say the one among commenters of /r/worldnews or HN. It is a bubble, of course. Most or all my Facebook friends are from the same age, same few countries and more or less similar economic background. Twitter and Reddit have their particular leanings and dogma. So, there is definitely a "filter bubble" compared to "the sum total of world opinions". But I'd still argue that there are more view points in that filter bubble than in the editorial voices within the press of a given country targeting a particular political affiliation. Perhaps not as much as there should be, given the possibilities, but still...
  - johnny99 12y ago
    Very much agree. When I was a kid I watched one (and only one) of the three network news channels, read The New York Times + the local paper, and that was about it--this was before the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, so talk radio hadn't yet metastasized. It was hard to get alternative opinions in either direction, even if you wanted to. Compared to that social media is a cornucopia/vomitorium of diversity. Alternate opinions are easy to find and sometimes hard to escape.
    - e12e 12y ago
      Managing to challenge ones preconceptions is always going to take work. Also note that for someone getting their news from FOX News, the New York Times is a left-wing outlier. News is pretty terrible in Norway too, but I always feel like I'm in a sitcom whenever I visit the US/Canada. Where BBC and the Guardian appear as bastions against the establishment -- while they of course are very much mainstream. On the other hand, I'm quite grateful to many of the Republican bloggers/commenters for offering their view on US politics -- it can be easy to forget that the US has a strong intellectual tradition, and while you'll find me agreeing with/quoting Chomsky or Klein more often than anyone on the other end -- there are quite a few voices on the right that have strong and interesting opinions on freedom, independence, commerce, curbing of federal powers etc. Anyway, with HN being so dominated by the US in general, and Silicon Valley (including the part of SV that lives in NYC ;-) -- I find it can be quite a contrast to my other echo chambers... I'm afraid I couldn't suggest anything similar that is more left leaning -- maybe https://zcomm.org/znet/ https://zcomm.org/znet/ or http://monthlyreview.org/ http://monthlyreview.org/ (but I don't really follow either -- and they certainly can't compare in any meaningful way with hn).
- anothermoron 12y ago
  They get their "diverse" opinions from an echo chamber. They really believe they get diversw opinions but they are actually from people with the same agenda.
- funkyy 12y ago
  Well news.ycombinator.com is one that comes to my mind.
- Dewie 12y ago
  Judging by how many redditors whine about "the reddit circlejerk", it might not be as bad as that book you are alluding to thinks: each time I see someone complaining about a circlejerk, I infer that they really mean that they don't like that they feel they are the minority opinion.
- philwelch 12y ago
  The CBS Evening News had a filter bubble too, it's just that everyone had the same filter bubble and his name was Walter Cronkite.
- ObviousScience 12y ago
  Off-topic: I've always wondered if you could make some sort of website with an anti-bubble. Probably in the style of Twitter, since you'd want to minimize reliance on outside content of dubious provenance, but possibly in the style of reddit with a system that instead of just linking, there'd be some kind of automatic reputation system for the websites linked to. (For the reddit example, think hybrid link and self-post, where you link to a item and then write an opinion about it.) Rather than try to show you things that it thinks you'd find agreeable, it shows you opinions that meet your epistemological and deductive methods, but have different conclusions. Detecting reasoning method would likely be difficult, but it might be possible to analyze your argument for similarities to another one, and then show you how people responded to that post. Of course people would still think that there are logical faults in the other person's argument and dispute their facts, but the goal is to match you with people you'd like to argue with rather than with views you'd get a warm fuzzy by agreeing with. Likely, you'd want to put in a mix of the opinions that's roughly reflective of the user base (eg, X% of users support abortion, so about X% of the posts you see on the topic will concur with that view). An interesting extension would be to see how far you can go down the formalism path without encumbering the process beyond what people are willing to put up with. (Perhaps require more formalism when introducing external sources, eg websites, and less when just talking about a free standing opinion.) Regardless, I think we're going to see the rise of communities meant to mix and compete opinions, instead of making echo chambers of them.
  - e12e 12y ago
    Not sure how things are going over at wikinews, now -- but it is at least one project trying for locally sourced(ish) news: https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page I seem to recall it was practically defunct for a while, maybe while google news was in vogue/before it made (more of?) a point of showing "news fit for you". I suppose it might still show an interesting sampling, if opened in an incognito tab? (actually the Norwegian edition appears identical to me, logged in or not - so who knows?): https://news.google.com https://news.google.com Either way Google News insist on one choosing an "edition" -- would be more interesting if there was an "International English" edition IMNHO. FWIW during the height of the #Occupy protests, I always found the various local/community web/fb pages more interesting than mainstream media. But it can be hard to sort through the deliberate and accidental mus-information when one hasn't got the ability to just walk down and talk to people there, to find out who's writing what, and get a sense of the why (I did eventually have the chance to visit and do that -- but travelling to another continent whenever something interesting is happening is obviously not a workable strategy. And I wouldn't exactly go hiking through Syria just to have a chat with people from all sides of the conflict...).
PebblesHD 12y ago
'Millenials don't read newspapers' - or, as I like to call it, 'Another article telling you what young people do sourced from every possible avenue other than asking young people'. Under 30s are the biggest readers of the local newspapers at my university, and the same can be said for my routing train travel and visits around the area. Young people are using an amazingly diverse selection of news sources that many older generations are simplly unaware of, or unwilling to admit. not to mention, i don't care who you ask, if you mix 'social action and entertainment' with news, the end result is something i would avoid like the plague.
- PebblesHD 12y ago
  @zwrose - they may be looking to move beyond anecdotal evidence but from what I took away they still seem to rely on the common perception that young people in general rely on technology/social media to the exclusion of traditional news media such as newspapers and news websites, this is what I was referring to. @tw04 - UTS has a surprisingly high percentage of the student body over 30, there are many people taking technology courses or up-skilling through advanced courses as mature age students. Of this composite population, my observations are that the younger students rely more on traditional news media than the older ones, to the point of younger students actually reading a newspaper in a room full of 40-somethings on their phones. Quite entertaining to watch from a personal perspective
  - zwrose 12y ago
    When a common perception is supported by statistically significant evidence, it starts to be more fact than perception. That's the point I was making. They aren't relying on a perception - they've taken a good step toward proving that the perception is true.
- zwrose 12y ago
  This isn't simply "another article" - its a significant study where they did exactly the opposite of what you described. They asked young people. Methodology is part of the OP [1]. You may very well have anecdotal evidence that millenials are reading newspapers, but this study seeks to move beyond anecdotal evidence. [1] http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/millennials-methodology/ http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/s...
Spooky23 12y ago
Let's be real here, national mainstream electronic media is somewhere between outright propaganda (yesterday's revelation and pictures of ISIS cross dressing soldiers retreating) and inane press release political fodder (sources in the White House report some BS that everyone knew anyway), and tabloid stuff. In the old days 1994, there was at least some journalistic content on the news with Peter Jennings. If you give a hoot about current events, the news isn't where you scratch that itch!
- cbd1984 12y ago
  > In the old days 1994, there was at least some journalistic content on the news with Peter Jennings. And people from a prior generation laughed at the idea of Peter Jennings being 'journalistic' and pinned their ideals on Brinkley and Huntley. Basically, this statement says nothing and means nothing, because it's just a generational marker, nothing more.
  - Spooky23 12y ago
    That's a total gloss-over. Broadcast news started out as an FCC mandate for licensing purpose, and a differentiator where more quality made a difference in the performance of the network. As the number of channels increased and mandates decreased, they shifted to a more "entertainy" format to keep viewers. This stuff is all available online. Look at the information density of a random broadcast in 1965, 1975, etc. Signal goes down, noise goes up.
    - cbd1984 12y ago
      > Broadcast news started out as an FCC mandate for licensing purpose, and a differentiator where more quality made a difference in the performance of the network. Given the history of news, this is very doubtful, unless you define 'quality' as 'more entertaining'.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  > In the old days 1994, there was at least some journalistic content on the news with Peter Jennings. And people from a prior generation laughed at the idea of Peter Jennings being 'journalistic' and pinned their ideals on Brinkley and Huntley. Basically, this statement says nothing and means nothing, because it's just a generational marker, nothing more.
funkyy 12y ago
I am a bit tired to look at millennials like different species. If you want to know things about them - ask them...
- corysama 12y ago
  > If you want to know things about them - ask them... That's exactly what they did... 1,046 times
brc 12y ago
The reverse of this is of course baby boomer generations who hate what the news has become (TV and Newspaper) yet slavishly consume it anyway, because of a lifetime habit. Whenever I see an older relative frothing about some stupid article in the newspaper, or some pointless piece on TV - I just say 'why not switch it off? Why buy the paper anyway?' I don't watch the news or read newspapers anymore, unless I happen to be in the vicinity of either by accident. If something important happens, I find out. Everyone does. Neighbours, people you work with - they're always delighted to share news you didn't hear about, and they don't drop in ads. In the case of TV news and newspapers - lets say 6 hours a week glued to the talking heads and 4 hours a week in the paper = 500 hours a year - 12 24hr days in total, or 24 12hr days. All so they can sell your eyeballs to the highest bidder. Who wouldn't like 24 extra days time to do as they please with? Stop paying attention to the media. You end up selling your time for pennies worth of benefit.
- ternaryoperator 12y ago
  >In the case of TV news and newspapers - lets say 6 hours a week glued to the talking heads and 4 hours a week in the paper = 500 hours a year - 12 24hr days in total, or 24 12hr days. All so they can sell your eyeballs to the highest bidder. Who wouldn't like 24 extra days time to do as they please with? So, exactly like Twitter and FB.
- Sven7 12y ago
  It's not that simple. Capturing people's attention is now a well studied science. The addiction is engineered. The people who are addicted(or "engaged") to their media streams whether social or main stream need the same sort of help any addict needs to kick the habit. Since the addiction thus far hasn't caused lung cancer, driving accidents, violent behavior etc we can all continue to 1. make money of it and 2. tell the addicts to figure it out for themselves
  - cweiss 12y ago
    Not to mention that the same people who would be relied on to spread any information about the harm of consuming said media is... said media.
Jedd 12y ago
Interestingly they declined to define 'news' .. perhaps the study proper did, though it's such a nebulous term that it's probably moot in any case. Facebook is cited as being a primary source of news, yet items that I see pop up in the 'news' block on FB are generally of the fashion, entertainment and asinine activities of alleged celebrities variety... not news by my definition.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  As far as I'm concerned, a kidnapping case from two states away isn't news. News is something which could affect me or which I could affect; if it's an Amber Alert from my hometown or close by, it's news in a vague sense that, in theory, I might have some effect on it. (Statistically I'd have a better shot at winning a small prize in a lottery, but still...) So: The Columbine school shooting? Not news. I've never lived near Columbine. The laws and changing social attitudes as a result of that? News.
ttty 12y ago
So they are worried that have lost the power to persuade people?? Why would I want to know about a hurricane the other part of the world? IMO 99% of the news are junk, but is my opinion. Imagine all the time you lost on being brain-washed.
niels_olson 12y ago
Am I the only what who came away thinking these must have been the most leading questions every written in a poll?

81 points by johnny99 12y ago

The one part I can't believe is that 86% of people think they're "Usually [seeing] diverse opinions through social media". The "filter bubble" is going to get worse and worse, it seems. Has anyone had any good experiences where a piece of information technology (forum, reddit, twitter, insta, etc) didn't encourage a filter bubble?

proksoup 12y ago
Trolls cross the lines. "If you don't agree with the person who made this video why are you posting here?!?! Get a life troll!" Trolls is the heroes of the internet, the diversity.
- angersock 12y ago
  The few, the proud, the unwilling to be quietly wrong in their own corner. You need us. :)
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - cbd1984 12y ago
    Nobody needs the people who harass others and attempt to ridicule them into silence.
    - angersock 12y ago
      Incorrect without further qualification. There are people in the set of "others" who very much deserve harassment and ridicule--consider people actively working against the common good, like Scientologists or other online trolls or robber barons or city bosses.
      - cbd1984 12y ago
        Internet trolls are the people who dox others and drive them to suicide. We can achieve more without them than with them.
        proksoup 12y ago
        I suppose we both could have said "some" eh.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- cbd1984 12y ago
  Trolls are reinforcing the bubble by "proving" that everyone outside of it is purely an asshole with no intent to have a conversation, merely to insult and ridicule and try to cause people to leave the forum.
  - proksoup 12y ago
    The problem is the labeling of them as trolls, is what I meant. There is no such thing as trolls, that person you call a troll is making a joke or making a point and you're too far inside your own bubble to not call them an asshole.
    - cbd1984 12y ago
      No, the person who's harassing someone for being different isn't making a joke or a point. They're harassing someone for being different. People who try to make others commit suicide don't have a valid point.
      - proksoup 12y ago
        Okay. I believe you. I'm not familiar with those. The sorts of things I've seen are more like Berta Lovejoy / Doritan Cheeto.
lazaroclapp 12y ago
Well, one thing to consider is that the "filter bubble" is relative, to a degree. We are talking about news, for a mainstream audience. So, the old fashioned alternative is perhaps reading a single physical newspaper, watching 1 or 2 tv news shows and perhaps listening to one radio station, all of similar political bent. Compared to that, the variance of view points among my Facebook friends is likely still higher, as is, say the one among commenters of /r/worldnews or HN. It is a bubble, of course. Most or all my Facebook friends are from the same age, same few countries and more or less similar economic background. Twitter and Reddit have their particular leanings and dogma. So, there is definitely a "filter bubble" compared to "the sum total of world opinions". But I'd still argue that there are more view points in that filter bubble than in the editorial voices within the press of a given country targeting a particular political affiliation. Perhaps not as much as there should be, given the possibilities, but still...
- johnny99 12y ago
  Very much agree. When I was a kid I watched one (and only one) of the three network news channels, read The New York Times + the local paper, and that was about it--this was before the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, so talk radio hadn't yet metastasized. It was hard to get alternative opinions in either direction, even if you wanted to. Compared to that social media is a cornucopia/vomitorium of diversity. Alternate opinions are easy to find and sometimes hard to escape.
  - e12e 12y ago
    Managing to challenge ones preconceptions is always going to take work. Also note that for someone getting their news from FOX News, the New York Times is a left-wing outlier. News is pretty terrible in Norway too, but I always feel like I'm in a sitcom whenever I visit the US/Canada. Where BBC and the Guardian appear as bastions against the establishment -- while they of course are very much mainstream. On the other hand, I'm quite grateful to many of the Republican bloggers/commenters for offering their view on US politics -- it can be easy to forget that the US has a strong intellectual tradition, and while you'll find me agreeing with/quoting Chomsky or Klein more often than anyone on the other end -- there are quite a few voices on the right that have strong and interesting opinions on freedom, independence, commerce, curbing of federal powers etc. Anyway, with HN being so dominated by the US in general, and Silicon Valley (including the part of SV that lives in NYC ;-) -- I find it can be quite a contrast to my other echo chambers... I'm afraid I couldn't suggest anything similar that is more left leaning -- maybe https://zcomm.org/znet/ https://zcomm.org/znet/ or http://monthlyreview.org/ http://monthlyreview.org/ (but I don't really follow either -- and they certainly can't compare in any meaningful way with hn).
anothermoron 12y ago
They get their "diverse" opinions from an echo chamber. They really believe they get diversw opinions but they are actually from people with the same agenda.
funkyy 12y ago
Well news.ycombinator.com is one that comes to my mind.
Dewie 12y ago
Judging by how many redditors whine about "the reddit circlejerk", it might not be as bad as that book you are alluding to thinks: each time I see someone complaining about a circlejerk, I infer that they really mean that they don't like that they feel they are the minority opinion.
philwelch 12y ago
The CBS Evening News had a filter bubble too, it's just that everyone had the same filter bubble and his name was Walter Cronkite.
ObviousScience 12y ago
Off-topic: I've always wondered if you could make some sort of website with an anti-bubble. Probably in the style of Twitter, since you'd want to minimize reliance on outside content of dubious provenance, but possibly in the style of reddit with a system that instead of just linking, there'd be some kind of automatic reputation system for the websites linked to. (For the reddit example, think hybrid link and self-post, where you link to a item and then write an opinion about it.) Rather than try to show you things that it thinks you'd find agreeable, it shows you opinions that meet your epistemological and deductive methods, but have different conclusions. Detecting reasoning method would likely be difficult, but it might be possible to analyze your argument for similarities to another one, and then show you how people responded to that post. Of course people would still think that there are logical faults in the other person's argument and dispute their facts, but the goal is to match you with people you'd like to argue with rather than with views you'd get a warm fuzzy by agreeing with. Likely, you'd want to put in a mix of the opinions that's roughly reflective of the user base (eg, X% of users support abortion, so about X% of the posts you see on the topic will concur with that view). An interesting extension would be to see how far you can go down the formalism path without encumbering the process beyond what people are willing to put up with. (Perhaps require more formalism when introducing external sources, eg websites, and less when just talking about a free standing opinion.) Regardless, I think we're going to see the rise of communities meant to mix and compete opinions, instead of making echo chambers of them.
- e12e 12y ago
  Not sure how things are going over at wikinews, now -- but it is at least one project trying for locally sourced(ish) news: https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page I seem to recall it was practically defunct for a while, maybe while google news was in vogue/before it made (more of?) a point of showing "news fit for you". I suppose it might still show an interesting sampling, if opened in an incognito tab? (actually the Norwegian edition appears identical to me, logged in or not - so who knows?): https://news.google.com https://news.google.com Either way Google News insist on one choosing an "edition" -- would be more interesting if there was an "International English" edition IMNHO. FWIW during the height of the #Occupy protests, I always found the various local/community web/fb pages more interesting than mainstream media. But it can be hard to sort through the deliberate and accidental mus-information when one hasn't got the ability to just walk down and talk to people there, to find out who's writing what, and get a sense of the why (I did eventually have the chance to visit and do that -- but travelling to another continent whenever something interesting is happening is obviously not a workable strategy. And I wouldn't exactly go hiking through Syria just to have a chat with people from all sides of the conflict...).

PebblesHD 12y ago

'Millenials don't read newspapers' - or, as I like to call it, 'Another article telling you what young people do sourced from every possible avenue other than asking young people'. Under 30s are the biggest readers of the local newspapers at my university, and the same can be said for my routing train travel and visits around the area. Young people are using an amazingly diverse selection of news sources that many older generations are simplly unaware of, or unwilling to admit. not to mention, i don't care who you ask, if you mix 'social action and entertainment' with news, the end result is something i would avoid like the plague.

PebblesHD 12y ago
@zwrose - they may be looking to move beyond anecdotal evidence but from what I took away they still seem to rely on the common perception that young people in general rely on technology/social media to the exclusion of traditional news media such as newspapers and news websites, this is what I was referring to. @tw04 - UTS has a surprisingly high percentage of the student body over 30, there are many people taking technology courses or up-skilling through advanced courses as mature age students. Of this composite population, my observations are that the younger students rely more on traditional news media than the older ones, to the point of younger students actually reading a newspaper in a room full of 40-somethings on their phones. Quite entertaining to watch from a personal perspective
- zwrose 12y ago
  When a common perception is supported by statistically significant evidence, it starts to be more fact than perception. That's the point I was making. They aren't relying on a perception - they've taken a good step toward proving that the perception is true.
zwrose 12y ago
This isn't simply "another article" - its a significant study where they did exactly the opposite of what you described. They asked young people. Methodology is part of the OP [1]. You may very well have anecdotal evidence that millenials are reading newspapers, but this study seeks to move beyond anecdotal evidence. [1] http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/millennials-methodology/ http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/s...

Spooky23 12y ago

Let's be real here, national mainstream electronic media is somewhere between outright propaganda (yesterday's revelation and pictures of ISIS cross dressing soldiers retreating) and inane press release political fodder (sources in the White House report some BS that everyone knew anyway), and tabloid stuff. In the old days 1994, there was at least some journalistic content on the news with Peter Jennings. If you give a hoot about current events, the news isn't where you scratch that itch!

cbd1984 12y ago
> In the old days 1994, there was at least some journalistic content on the news with Peter Jennings. And people from a prior generation laughed at the idea of Peter Jennings being 'journalistic' and pinned their ideals on Brinkley and Huntley. Basically, this statement says nothing and means nothing, because it's just a generational marker, nothing more.
- Spooky23 12y ago
  That's a total gloss-over. Broadcast news started out as an FCC mandate for licensing purpose, and a differentiator where more quality made a difference in the performance of the network. As the number of channels increased and mandates decreased, they shifted to a more "entertainy" format to keep viewers. This stuff is all available online. Look at the information density of a random broadcast in 1965, 1975, etc. Signal goes down, noise goes up.
  - cbd1984 12y ago
    > Broadcast news started out as an FCC mandate for licensing purpose, and a differentiator where more quality made a difference in the performance of the network. Given the history of news, this is very doubtful, unless you define 'quality' as 'more entertaining'.
cbd1984 12y ago
> In the old days 1994, there was at least some journalistic content on the news with Peter Jennings. And people from a prior generation laughed at the idea of Peter Jennings being 'journalistic' and pinned their ideals on Brinkley and Huntley. Basically, this statement says nothing and means nothing, because it's just a generational marker, nothing more.

funkyy 12y ago

I am a bit tired to look at millennials like different species. If you want to know things about them - ask them...

corysama 12y ago
> If you want to know things about them - ask them... That's exactly what they did... 1,046 times

brc 12y ago

The reverse of this is of course baby boomer generations who hate what the news has become (TV and Newspaper) yet slavishly consume it anyway, because of a lifetime habit. Whenever I see an older relative frothing about some stupid article in the newspaper, or some pointless piece on TV - I just say 'why not switch it off? Why buy the paper anyway?' I don't watch the news or read newspapers anymore, unless I happen to be in the vicinity of either by accident. If something important happens, I find out. Everyone does. Neighbours, people you work with - they're always delighted to share news you didn't hear about, and they don't drop in ads. In the case of TV news and newspapers - lets say 6 hours a week glued to the talking heads and 4 hours a week in the paper = 500 hours a year - 12 24hr days in total, or 24 12hr days. All so they can sell your eyeballs to the highest bidder. Who wouldn't like 24 extra days time to do as they please with? Stop paying attention to the media. You end up selling your time for pennies worth of benefit.

ternaryoperator 12y ago
>In the case of TV news and newspapers - lets say 6 hours a week glued to the talking heads and 4 hours a week in the paper = 500 hours a year - 12 24hr days in total, or 24 12hr days. All so they can sell your eyeballs to the highest bidder. Who wouldn't like 24 extra days time to do as they please with? So, exactly like Twitter and FB.
Sven7 12y ago
It's not that simple. Capturing people's attention is now a well studied science. The addiction is engineered. The people who are addicted(or "engaged") to their media streams whether social or main stream need the same sort of help any addict needs to kick the habit. Since the addiction thus far hasn't caused lung cancer, driving accidents, violent behavior etc we can all continue to 1. make money of it and 2. tell the addicts to figure it out for themselves
- cweiss 12y ago
  Not to mention that the same people who would be relied on to spread any information about the harm of consuming said media is... said media.

Jedd 12y ago

Interestingly they declined to define 'news' .. perhaps the study proper did, though it's such a nebulous term that it's probably moot in any case. Facebook is cited as being a primary source of news, yet items that I see pop up in the 'news' block on FB are generally of the fashion, entertainment and asinine activities of alleged celebrities variety... not news by my definition.

cbd1984 12y ago
As far as I'm concerned, a kidnapping case from two states away isn't news. News is something which could affect me or which I could affect; if it's an Amber Alert from my hometown or close by, it's news in a vague sense that, in theory, I might have some effect on it. (Statistically I'd have a better shot at winning a small prize in a lottery, but still...) So: The Columbine school shooting? Not news. I've never lived near Columbine. The laws and changing social attitudes as a result of that? News.

ttty 12y ago

So they are worried that have lost the power to persuade people?? Why would I want to know about a hurricane the other part of the world? IMO 99% of the news are junk, but is my opinion. Imagine all the time you lost on being brain-washed.

niels_olson 12y ago

Am I the only what who came away thinking these must have been the most leading questions every written in a poll?