Submission + - Is more knowledge really a good thing?
(arg!)Styopa writes: Seeing the recent Slashvertisment for twitter (How to supplement election coverage http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/01/2141228), that got me thinking — are we past the point of value in terms of information flow?
Understand, this would be a serious paradigm shift. Personally, I've lived my whole life with the concept that 'more information is better' — with admittedly a patronizing opinion of people who didn't have the same view. "You mean you DON'T know about (insert world event)?!?" "What do you mean, you don't care about (desperate current issue)?!?" The idea that we may have reached a point where more information is a negative thing, that's simply anathema to one of my core beliefs.
I'm even having trouble writing this, conceptualizing a world where there is some sort of limit on the knowledge I want to have. Does anyone else feel this way?
Reading a newspaper every day — what does that get me? Checking web news reports multiple times a day, 24-hour news feeds from TV, all of that devoted to burying the public under more and more news coverage...for what purpose? Aside from a general understanding of the world around us which one could get from a weekly newspaper, or even a monthly magazine, is there really a benefit? I'm not saying that I prefer my news edited, digested, and mashed into consumer-ready pap — not at all. But I can get by sufficiently for my daily life without the bombardment — an occasional, general summary is probably enough.
I certainly believe that having the information AVAILABLE is a good thing. If I had family members in some crisis area of the world, or ran a company whose interests were directly affected by some obscure events, I'd like to be able to delve into the data in as much detail as possible. But the firehose for the general public? Not so much. In the same sense that we all get by with a general weather forecast for the day, we'd be uselessly overwhelmed if we got new full reports with temperature, wind, barometer, and weather every 10 seconds.
I grew up in a rural Minnesota farm town, where most of the people followed world events but didn't care too much about them. A war? Sure, some boys would go off and wouldn't come back, and that would be tragic. Without a war, probably a similar number of teens would die in equally-tragic drunk-driving accidents. A big crash on Wall Street? Meh, interest rates will tighten, crop prices will continue to go up or down. Politics? Ha, no matter who wins, taxes will go up.
I don't WANT my election coverage supplemented. Why would I? I'll vote how I vote, I don't particularly care how my neighbors vote, and the result is whatever it's going to be. Why watch with bated breath to see people make meaningless prognostications JUST so they can get my eyeballs to sell more advertising?
For that matter, it's not just an academic question. Would the housing crisis have been as bad if people only heard about it once per week instead of a constant tocsin of impending, inevitable doom?
As a kid, I used to look at the farmers and adult townspeople in my town as irredeemable hicks, that they didn't care about politics, world events, or much outside their locality. Now, especially when I see the vitriol and energy people are putting into a political contest which will really have only a trivial impact on how this country actually runs either way, I'm starting to wonder if perhaps those irredeemable hicks had a good idea: pay attention only to what you need to, and don't waste energy on stuff that you really can't change anyway.
Understand, this would be a serious paradigm shift. Personally, I've lived my whole life with the concept that 'more information is better' — with admittedly a patronizing opinion of people who didn't have the same view. "You mean you DON'T know about (insert world event)?!?" "What do you mean, you don't care about (desperate current issue)?!?" The idea that we may have reached a point where more information is a negative thing, that's simply anathema to one of my core beliefs.
I'm even having trouble writing this, conceptualizing a world where there is some sort of limit on the knowledge I want to have. Does anyone else feel this way?
Reading a newspaper every day — what does that get me? Checking web news reports multiple times a day, 24-hour news feeds from TV, all of that devoted to burying the public under more and more news coverage...for what purpose? Aside from a general understanding of the world around us which one could get from a weekly newspaper, or even a monthly magazine, is there really a benefit? I'm not saying that I prefer my news edited, digested, and mashed into consumer-ready pap — not at all. But I can get by sufficiently for my daily life without the bombardment — an occasional, general summary is probably enough.
I certainly believe that having the information AVAILABLE is a good thing. If I had family members in some crisis area of the world, or ran a company whose interests were directly affected by some obscure events, I'd like to be able to delve into the data in as much detail as possible. But the firehose for the general public? Not so much. In the same sense that we all get by with a general weather forecast for the day, we'd be uselessly overwhelmed if we got new full reports with temperature, wind, barometer, and weather every 10 seconds.
I grew up in a rural Minnesota farm town, where most of the people followed world events but didn't care too much about them. A war? Sure, some boys would go off and wouldn't come back, and that would be tragic. Without a war, probably a similar number of teens would die in equally-tragic drunk-driving accidents. A big crash on Wall Street? Meh, interest rates will tighten, crop prices will continue to go up or down. Politics? Ha, no matter who wins, taxes will go up.
I don't WANT my election coverage supplemented. Why would I? I'll vote how I vote, I don't particularly care how my neighbors vote, and the result is whatever it's going to be. Why watch with bated breath to see people make meaningless prognostications JUST so they can get my eyeballs to sell more advertising?
For that matter, it's not just an academic question. Would the housing crisis have been as bad if people only heard about it once per week instead of a constant tocsin of impending, inevitable doom?
As a kid, I used to look at the farmers and adult townspeople in my town as irredeemable hicks, that they didn't care about politics, world events, or much outside their locality. Now, especially when I see the vitriol and energy people are putting into a political contest which will really have only a trivial impact on how this country actually runs either way, I'm starting to wonder if perhaps those irredeemable hicks had a good idea: pay attention only to what you need to, and don't waste energy on stuff that you really can't change anyway.