RE: HOW DO YOU PROCESS THE NEWS?

Catching up today on some older phlog posts, I read Alex Schroeder 
talking about how he reads news:
gopher://alexschroeder.ch/02025-03-05-processing

I get the impression that he doesn't often read Gopher himself, but 
I feel like replying anyway. An interesting thing is that he lists 
all his news sources as, what I gather to be, Mastodon identities. 
I'm not sure how that works, maybe like on Usenet people post links 
back to articles on the web. It's common enough for those articles 
to be from untrustworthy sources (either obscure or just popularly 
idiotic), so I don't expect to trust them just on the basis of the 
person posting the link. Or are they a direct repeater for articles 
from specific sources, like how I use Gwene to read specific RSS 
feeds (I've started adopting those lately)?

Well it's probably in evidence now that my lack of understanding of 
Mastodon means I didn't really understand much of what Alex 
Schroeder said. But anyway, for my answer, general news all comes 
from the ABC, the Australian government-funded media agency. 
Usually TV and radio, but maybe once every month or two something 
might interest me enough to look it up on their horrible website.

It's fair to say I don't really have much faith in their reporting, 
I just don't have any more faith in commercial news services. They 
are blatantly left-wing biased, and I don't know if in part it's my 
frustration with that which tempts me towards more right-wing 
opinions just to be contrary with their waffle. It frightens me how 
people echo out the bias of such news reports seemingly without any 
critical thinking of their own. The internet offers the chance to 
do a deep dive into topics and really learn enough to form an 
opinion based on the competing intricacies of real life rather than 
the warped summaries that the media uses to fit that world into 
their tidy little box. But it's rarely much good to know all that. 
People don't want to hear such finer points in conversation - you 
either agree with their chosen media gods or you don't. I find it 
fun doing the research, but it's a big mental strain for no reward. 
I sit there unhealthily at a computer for half a day using up 
electricity and internet data which at the same time I'm making no 
money to pay for, only to be left with enough mental energy to do 
nothing more than housework or movie watching for the rest of the 
day. What for? Entertainment basically, and if it's just 
entertainment then why not satisfy myself with just the borderline 
propaganda that comes beamed to my TV and radio? Does it matter if 
I believe it or not?

I can't say I've really answered that. I've narrowed into some 
topics I enjoy which also seem meaningfully relevant. I'm reading 
more about the technical and straegic aspects of warfare from sites 
like The War Zone, via RSS, albeit intermittently. For longer, of 
course, I've been interested in specific computer topics, and I'm 
now looking at RSS feeds for some websites dedicated to those too. 
But somehow I'm more bored with the computer news than ever. It 
should be the most relevant to me, but, as I keep saying, computers 
like the mid-90s PC I'm posting from now, running Linux from the 
early 2000s, are already at the point I need them to be. 
Advancements are kind-of interesting but also often seem silly or
even frustratingly counter-productive, and the industry is clearly 
deep down the rabbit hole of inventing work for itself. AI in its 
current popular form is such a dominate case of this that I feel 
inclined to tune out at the mention of it, and it seems to have 
taken the spotlight away from coverage of wider topics in the 
research field. An impending AI market crash seems very likely, 
but that's academic too since I haven't got enough money to take a 
reasonable risk trying to bet on it.

Maybe I'm just turning early into a grumpy old man. I've always 
felt a little ahead of my generation in world view. Not that I know 
anyone else of my generation properly anymore to compare with. 
Still there might be a better way than just yelling at my TV every 
night and tuning over to repeats on other channels for the duration 
of especially annoying coverage. Or if I could just cut off my 
economic ties to society, with barely any social ties already, I'd 
perhaps feel comfortable with just ignoring the lot of it, like 
some people claim to do.

 - The Free Thinker