undefined | Better HN

0 pointssimonsarris6y ago0 comments

> It is important to know about decisions being made that affect the country you live in.

It's mostly not. The vast majority of daily political yammering and scandals has no effect.

People mostly use politics as a way to dodge real problems in their life that they could be solving. You see this most clearly with the way people bat about words like "capitalism" into nonsense definitions. Their criticisms are almost always manifestations of personal issues.

More generally, people mature when they stop believing politics will solve their problems. It is very sad to see people who spend years hoping their candidate will get into office to reorder the world for them (spoiler, they won't), when they could change how they live today to actually reflect their own values.

As for breaking news, etc. If its actually important, it will get to you anyway, I promise.

You don't have to spend time on Twitter, but if you're looking for internet places to go like the OP is, you can find things there that you will never find elsewhere. I'm answering his question sincerely. You can make new friends and start new collab projects through places like Twitter and Hacker News. I've done it! You're not gonna get that reading CNN or BBC or whatever. You're probably not going to get any actionable, meaningful information from news sources like those, especially day to day.

Twitter is 100% amazing, hugely underrated, and a return to the mode of being that we had pre-1500's, where most knowledge was obtained through dialogue instead of one-way broadcasts, and I will die on that hill.

0 comments

5 comments · 3 top-level

ktm5j6y ago· 2 in thread

Saying that twitter is anything like the sociopolitical dynamics of pre-1500 is just as ludicrous as your other statements. You're acting like hiding in a hole and ignoring the issues around you is the right thing to do.. and trying to sell it like you've discovered this new and better way to live.

simonsarrisOP6y ago

I disagree. I've written a little about this: https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/are-we-still-thinking-795bd...

In pre-modern times one talked to more people, sometimes in a single day, than one would ever read in one's lifetime. Today it's the opposite: we will always read/see/hear from more sources that we cannot converse with than we will ever speak to. Twitter allows you great opportunity for dialogue again. It's the first social network that's gotten good at this way of interacting.

Declining to read news sites and ignoring capital P Politics is not hiding in a hole. Perhaps its having priorities that are too different than the ones you're used to, but if that's the case I hope it gives you pause.

Terretta6y ago

The rebuttal here isn’t that declining to read news is hiding in a hole, it’s that getting your world-view updates (“news”) by following individuals on Twitter is worse.

For instance, it’s been argued that the “low-information” Twitter bubble is partly culpable for Hillary’s loss.

Having read your assertions here and your link, it seems your premise is based on a misunderstanding of historical and modern sociology of both conversation and information propagation.

You’re focusing on mass media as though it replaced conversation. It’s not at all clear that it did.

People still converse verbally as much as they used to, but with today’s mobility patterns the interlocutors they encounter in person both among acquaintances and at random today are more diverse than those they rubbed shoulders with 500 years ago. And each of those can converse with a more diverse group in turn.

By sifting through and following a subset of Twitter, you’re (however unintentionally) narrowing your aperture, and you tend to end up consuming bon mots like bonbons rather than engaging in deeper dialog opportunistically or spontaneously.

Before Twitter, its mode of communication was called micro-casting:

https://study.com/academy/lesson/microcasting-definition-exa...

You’ve drawn a line between TV or radio and Twitter as though it’s conversational, but once you account for the ratio of pub to sub, from followed to followers, you see it’s not the same mode as conversation. On the contrary, you’ve just self-selected your own personalized micro-channel, and are recommending others do the same to the exclusion of thoughtfully curated information from a long evolving school of journalistic practice.

At the same time, despite Netflix, Twitter, or Facebook, the art of serious and coherent conversation endures, ideally informed by both individual interests and shared news of significance:

https://www.economist.com/special-report/2006/12/19/chatteri...

From the town crier to the newsprint to today’s subscriptions to Reuters, ProPublica, economist, guardian, wapo, nyt, etc. (see link for independent sources), curated and contextualized news has informed local conversation, national debate, and societal outcomes.

https://soapboxie.com/social-issues/A-Real-Need-for-the-Real...

That value is being challenged by advertising driven content mills, which degrades the quality of news, but selecting vetted journalistic sources is not particularly different from selecting which Twitter quipsters to follow.

Some sources are tilting at the ad supported windmill, trying to find alternative economic models for journalism:

https://blog.joincivil.com/the-value-of-journalism-1c0e6905f...

To quote from that link, “... at the end of the day, we live in the real world. It’s what makes journalism so essential and durable: a free society’s demand to know what’s happening will never cease.“

ploika6y ago

It still sounds like you think I'm experiencing American style politics and media.

It's silly to act like tabloid press and opinion pieces by vested interests are the same as dry fact-based reporting on the passage of bills through a parliament.

My country has had coalition or minority governments since my parents were children, and we don't have first past the post voting. People here don't have "their candidate" as such either, because we have multi seat constituencies. People increasingly don't even have a political party (of which there are several) that they reliably vote for.

I disagree very strongly with the notion that people mature when they effectively give up on politics. That's a dangerous message. People mature (for good or ill) when they put time and effort into making changes to their communities that affect others, whether that's getting a new bus stop, rezoning land, or changing laws or tax rates in some direction. That stuff is always and inevitably political.

dynamic_sausage6y ago

> You're probably not going to get any actionable, meaningful information from news sources like those, especially day to day.

Not day to day perhaps, but I did once learn from the news that a certain French airline company had just gone bankrupt. This was about a month before I intended to fly with them, so I had enough time to rebook the tickets, avoiding the stress and additional expenses. Learning about this bankruptcy in time was very helpful, as the company did not care enough to send a warning email to its customers, so if it were not for the breaking news headline, I would have to buy the replacement tickets on a much shorter notice.

Skimming through the headlines can pay off in some unexpected ways, and does not take too much time/effort.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse