I recently read an interesting book by Rolf Debelli about why reading the news isn’t a terribly good idea. On the whole it is a good book, however, it could be cut down into a short blog. In it, he argues that people should completely quit reading the news and read informational sources that are more relevant to their field of study and their daily lives. The reason he gives for this is that much of the news is bollocks that you can safely ignore without losing any value in your life.
On the whole, I agree with this argument. There isn’t really much that the news offers that you really need. Much of the news isn’t even academically or intellectually interesting. Mostly, it is just glorified gossip, or as journalists often like to call it “colour” and “human interest”. However, if you treat the news as a data source, a bit like any other informational source, such as: books, blogs, podcasts, documentation or journal articles then it can have value.
My main problem with the news is that the signal-to-noise ratio is unbearable. The news is almost exclusively noise. Additionally, what is valuable and useful for one person is not necessarily the same as for the next person. Although some things, of course, are unadulterated rubbish.
Until someone can come up with some sort of automation system that fixes a lot of this, then it’s likely that the best course of action is perhaps to try to use informational sources that are more curated, either things like The Economist’s The world this week, or perhaps more subject-specific things such as Hacker News.
Social media platforms such as Twitter as Facebook or just amplify noise. Perhaps, you can extrapolate from that the social media algorithms that are used in social media aren’t necessarily a good model for a solution, and certainly do not count as curation, or a “hive mind”.
I have tried to come up with something that could solve this problem using automation, and I can not see a way to solve this problem effectively. I really am not sure what, perhaps this is something for future thought and discussion.