Intelligence & News
For those who choked on my last entry, have no fear, I don’t plan on making a habit of posting my personal brain aches. I may from time to time, but I don’t want to make a habit of it. I do, however, want to point out something that freaks me out a bit. I have a number of sources that I regularly hit on the web, for a variety of reasons. Some I consider news sources. Some I consider mindless entertainment. Most I consider somewhere in the middle, having newsworthy beeps and blips, but overall casual content of which it is healthy to be skeptical.
One of my favorite sites for mindless entertainment is Digg.com. At least, that’s true at the moment. YouTube.com is up there too, though. Anyway, I am becoming really freaked by the stuff that pops up on Digg all of the time. CNN and other news entities have done stories on how people pay up to $15,000 to “game” a link to the front page of Digg - it means a lot of revenue improvement. My point here is to say that I take EVERYTHING I find on Digg with a colossal grain of salt. (I mean, the size which requires a wheelbarrow for transport.) I don’t know what the average user age of Digg is, but I am pretty sure it is in the teens and twenties. (Unlike YouTube, which reportedly fetches more old people than young people. What’s up with that, anyway?)
Anyway, during one of oh-so-many flame wars on Digg in the comments section on a particular story, I read one comment and shuddered. As my Uncle Bob would say, it was a full body shudder. He was responding to a guy freaking out about the story. His response was “If you don’t like the site, you can go get your news somewhere else.”
Hold the phone. NEWS? NEWS?? Dear boy, tell me that Digg is not your window to the world. It made me reflect on the current state of infotainment. I love shows like the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. They crack me up. But are they news? According to a recent (and for me, at least, highly questionable) study, the Daily Show contains the same amount of factual information as the average news show, and sometimes more. Wow, what a sad state of things. Not that I am bashing either of those Comedy Central shows. I am a fan. But I’d hate to see the day that they become the news… In fact, they are funnier when you already know the news…
I dunno, guys. That doesn’t bode well. Maybe it only speaks to the state of the demographic to which sites like Digg cater. But it really makes me think - I am still in a funk about the Jamil Hussein / Qais al-Bashir / fauxtography / increasingly If-It-Bleeds-It-Leads, businesslike approach to the news as of late. But I digress. In short - DIGG IS NOT A NEWS SITE. By a long, long shot. It is, however, great for brain ticklers.
For entertaining brain food, however - still not the news variety - I turn to blogs and books. My recent reading list (not updated, unfortunately) is on the front page of this site. And, I have a few items from The Corner today that I’ll touch upon, but here is the gist. On Digg, I shot time by reading about how to survive being trapped in your car (inspired by the James Kim case), the biggest mistakes in web design over the last few years, at least 6 different Mac rumors, and about a new non-lethal ray device. Fun, but not particularly substantive. The brain stretchers I caught up with on The Corner included a discussion on Fukuyama’s “End of History,” Islam, Fonte on national sovereignty (a la Rabkin), Kant vs. Lenin vs. Marx, biotech and neuroscience vs. the future of global liberal democracy, the meaning of the (English) word diseuse, how dogs are better than cats, Wales’ lack of indigenous alcoholic beverage, doctors who write - for better or worse, the 9th circuit court’s support of Hawaiian racism (which horrifies me, to say the least), math fights with John Derbyshire, and an instructional lesson in how to write “the most pretentious piece of writing in all of recorded history” by NYT critic Manohla Dirgis.
Good times, and good edutainment.