Comment Re:Old Idea, and Users Hate It (Score 1) 107
Having spend years reading newspaper(s) every morning for leads - like property purchases, planned construction, homes for sale ads in the classifieds, etc. - as a real estate broker I was pleasantly surprised when i got out of the business to find that reading the newspaper was an expensive, time-wasting, unnecessary, not-too productive habit. When news came online, nearly in real time, with enough details to satisfy any lingering curiosity, I stopped buying and reading them.
Having decided that watching TV - from the slanted, headline and brief sound-byte oriented talking-head news to the nearly unlimited and possibly entertaining shows that weren't scientifically truthful to hoards of stretched out, padded, unresolving, and questionable documentaries - was a waste of my time, was semi-addictive (you always want to channel surf to see what else is on during commercials or boring parts), was a distracting background noise that annoyed me, and was also forcing opinions and things I "should" be concerned about onto my already overloaded brain that was trying to think, I got rid of all my TVs. Besides, I've found most of the "news" is really only supposition and what-if and press releases and opinions or expert analyses anyway.
Having found that most magazines can be found online free and faster - and that usually the headlines were enough to get the gist of the story - i stopped reading things that were published months after the fact. Most magazines can be replaced, and even the glossy photography printed at home, by Google and web sites that focus on certain subjects.
The point is now that I don't have a lot of distractions clamoring for my visual and auditory attention I can concentrate on things that i want to do. Information overload is a real malady, getting worse all the time. I don't miss the old ways at all. And I have also discovered the key to filtering down all those inputs:
News that affects me will find me.
I have friends that tell me things, headlines alert me to news that might interest me, websites are constantly updated nearly real time enough to keep me on top of things, and if I happen to miss anything, somebody who thinks I owe them time or money or resources will contact me.