Slashdot Mirror
Does Personalized News Lead To Ignorance?
blackbearnh writes "As newspapers struggle to survive and local broadcasts try to find a way to compete with cable news, more and more news outlets are banking on what people want to hear about, rather than what they need to hear. Thoughtful analysis of problems is being pushed out of the way to make room for more celebrity gossip. Electronic news guru Chris Lee thinks that as people get news increasingly tailored to their tastes, the overall knowledge of important issues is plummeting. 'I think one of the observations about how consumers are behaving in the past five years that has surprised me the most is, again, this lack of feeling responsible for knowing the news of their country and their local government of that day. I don't think it's just a technology question. I think if you asked people now versus the same age group 20 years ago, I think they'd be stunningly less informed now about boring news, and tremendously more knowledgeable about bits of news that really interest them.'"
Boring news is called boring because it is indeed boring. If people were interested in boring news then it wouldn't be boring, it would be interesting. Technically anything that is newsworthy shouldn't be boring, because it would be interesting to someone.
Ok now I'm boring myself with this.
I tried to think of a good sig, and this wasn't it.
I get my daily news of internet meme at 4chan.
Still smarting over Air America.. huh? :)
Camping on quad since 1996.
Repeat with me... Corporations and Governments losing power to people is gooooooood.
Exactly. Todays youth have a much more balanced and informed opinion than any other time in history - now that the hierarchical control of information flow is breaking down. The ability to balance out corporate/government-MIC propaganda that has dominated News and print media almost since its inception with alternative points of view is a very good thing. From "New Media"
it has been the contention of scholars such as Douglas Kellner, Callum Rymer and James Bohman that new media, and particularly the Internet, provide the potential for a democratic postmodern public sphere, in which citizens can participate in well informed, non-hierarchical debate pertaining to their social structures. Contradicting these positive appraisals of the potential social impacts of new media are scholars such as Ed Herman and Robert McChesney who have suggested that the transition to new media has seen a handful of powerful transnational telecommunications corporations who achieve a level of global influence which was hitherto unimaginable.
Does reading Slashdot lead to ignorance? Nothing about the State of The Union here! Just news for nerds. If that is ignorance, give me a steaming platter!