Willfully Disengaged

I don't want to say that I'm willfully ignorant. I'm not that. I make an effort to read things that aren't fantasy. I think I probably consume non-fiction at a rate equal to my fiction reading at this point and considering how many books I read in a year I think that's pretty good. As the definition for ignorant is lacking in knowledge or education I think it's safe to say that I am not willfully ignorant. But there are some things I do to insulate myself from the way the world is. I think these things probably make me a happier person if not necessarily a better one.

In the world containing the internet it is possible to immerse yourself in the news all day every day. There are hundreds and thousands of news websites. You could read them or watch them all day every day and never see it all. Alternately, you could get all that fed to you in tiny bites from a news stream. You can see all those headlines, get a little gist, and read only the things that look interesting to you. Or you could be more traditional and watch the news or read a paper each morning. You could get the two-minute news every hour from a radio station if you wanted. You could also do some combination of the above where you have the news on in the background in the morning and then at work you have the news feed going and you look up articles about certain events or blurbs that interest you.

That same world, the one with the paper, the radio, the television, and the internet also makes it fairly difficult to avoid the news if you want to. I stopped watching television in highschool all together because it was otherwise impossible to not see any news on it. Even watching in the afternoon when the blah kind of mindless programming was on meant subjecting myself to news updates and "coming up on the six'o'clock news" style advertisements during the breaks. I could have tried to leave the room or change the channel but that, ultimately, probably wouldn't have been very effective and not only that but it would have drastically reduced any enjoyment I derived from the activity to begin with. So I came to the conclusion that it was probably better to just stop. I do watch television now but by television I mean "television shows". I watch television episode by episode on Netflix in an experience no different than watching a very long movie that has been broken into pieces. I choose what I want to see and I watch it. There is no channel surfing, no news, no just watching whatever happens to be on because it happens to be on. In fact, since they switched to the digital stream I cannot even watch regular tv if I wanted to despite the fact that my roommate has a HDTV... because there's no antenna or anything to go with it.

I could, if I chose, watch the news online or have a little stream of it to my desktop all day long or I could read it in the newspaper at work. Now that I am out of highschool and caring about the news is no longer a requirement to lead a productive life I just don't pay any attention to it ever. I sometimes check the weather after I find out about a storm from somewhere else and I occasionally hear the bizarre, isolated news story on the radio. But other than that the only news I hear about I hear passively from other people. I never ask about it, I just hear about it if they feel the burning desire to talk about it for some reason. This has made for some interesting thoughts about the way that information goes through networks. In this case, the network of people I know and interact with.

As it turns out, most of the news that I hear comes from strangers at work. I also disseminate most of the news that I hear to different strangers at work. I suppose it must be that strangers feel more comfortable talking about some neutral topic like the news or weather than anything else. I also find that the news I hear from strangers is more-or-less accurate or at least obviously false. I usually average out the weather forecasts of various people to get a much more accurate prediction than meteorologists ever give and I can easily tell when strangers are lying about things (usually unintentionally). The lies tend to be glaringly obvious because they have a certain grammatical feel the way a "trick" question has a certain feel. So hearing news orally is not a problem.

The other place I see a lot of news (or get it from there via my roommate) is on Facebook. The problem with news related from Facebook is that Facebook does not relate just the news. News can come along with theories and opinions and get morphed into entirely new "stories" with a modicum of truth in them and the force of people you know behind them to make them seem like real "news." News from Facebook is suspect because it has a reputation of being bad or flawed and yet because it always comes from people you know it's hard to resist the seductive logic that it must be true. And then there are the times when it is true. Your average person can easily distinguish between true and not true because they have a basis on which to lay the facts- a basis of news even if their basis hasn't been refreshed in a few days they can still determine, if they think about it, whether some piece of fresh news is true or false. Without a basis for the news however anything I see on Facebook has the potential for being true or not true at the same time the same way Schrodinger's cat exists.

Recently the weather was turning toward not being winter anymore as it tends to do eventually where I live and my roommate saw on Facebook that there was slated to be a huge storm the next day. A huge storm after a couple weeks of fair weather. Not totally unlikely given that I live in Maine and it's been known to hail in July here. But there was another factor. The storm was due to hit on the first of April. This one factor made me disregard everything I knew about weather and focus only on what I knew about people and about facebook. I concluded that it was probably a wildly-propagated joke. The weather was so bad on April first that aside from one of the stores (a store which is legally obligated to stay open) the mall where I work was closed. If the storm had been forecast for the last day of March instead of the first day of April my conclusion would have been that there must be a storm coming because after all this is Maine that I live in.

More recently than the weather incident there was another bit of news I learned about from facebook. The Government was going to shut down. Not the state government and they weren't just talking about black-out days that they do at the DMV. Facebook was panicking about a total shutdown of the government and any government spending and yelling angrily about how they weren't going to pay the military and how they had to pay the military. Of course they have to pay the military. They stop paying and they stop being the military. It was just as easy for me to see that this bit of news was wrong as it had been for me to assume that the storm was a hoax. This time I was reminded distinctly of Randall Munroe's comment about how Twitter was the best way to watch panic unfold in real time. Facebook's Newsfeed (intentionally) works the same way. I was watching a massive panic unfold where the only goal was the breeding of more panic and not the spreading of real information. This, unlike the storm, really was wrong. The Government had announced they weren't shutting down anything essential. Essential to them included Military, Health, Wellfare. Anything to do with any of those things wasn't to be shut down and of course included in that was all the bureaucracy as well. The only things I could really think of that they would have actually shut down were federal museums and National Parks.

So there are some hazards to disengaging from the news and certainly you might think I was a bad person because it took me whole days to learn anything about the mess in Haiti and I didn't think about it multiple times a day every day. Because I wasn't forced to by the news. I don't hear pundit's spewing nonsense and political lies or things that actually really don't matter to me. Not hearing the news except from other people applies an interesting filter. A filter that in turn must be re-filtered. It's maybe immoral and somewhat dangerous in terms of misinformation but what it also is is interesting. Knowing everything about everything leaves you nothing to talk about much less wonder about.