Apathy Sketchpad

This is something I imagine is familiar to a lot of you:

There was a time when I didn’t know what was in the charts because I was laughably ignorant of music. But then I started listening to it a bit, and after a while I found I was passably interested in the charts and knew generally what was there. But then I found that I cared less and less: I’d found the kinds of music I was interested in, and it mostly wasn’t anywhere near the charts, whereas the music that was in the charts sounded like the tedious generic pop that it was. I realised I’d lost touch with the charts when the new wave of indie music hit: to this day I can’t remember what the difference is between Razorlight, The Killers and Franz Ferdinand. (I vaguely wonder if, like the B in ‘R&B’ is now short for ‘bass’, ‘indie’ might now be short for ‘indistinguishable’.) But I still find new music that I like. My system works, and it does so without me having to hear whatever drivel has been packaged up and sold to infants and the infantile this week or finding out who won The X Factor at any point (providing they don’t cover a song people have strong feelings towards). My knowledge of music intersected with the mainstream for a while but then came out the other side.

I mention it because that I realised today that I did the same thing with the news: there was a time when I found it boring and ignored it. Then I began to take an interest, and started watching the news on TV, or reading newspapers. After a while I found I knew mostly what was going on. But now I don’t watch the TV news. And I don’t read newspapers. I’ve found my own sources of news. Google Reader (my RSS reader of choice — not very good but nevertheless the best) serves up a variety of blogs, select columns from newspapers, and a handful of bloggers’ and my friends’ picks from del.icio.us, tumblr, Facebook and Google Reader Shared Items, and Twitter lets me know what else is on their minds. I find that this works much, much better than the increasingly irrelevant traditional media.

I started doing this by accident, without noticing. I was getting my news from the Internet and I stopped reading newspapers mostly because there wasn’t one lying around most days. These days I’ll rarely bother to pick it up if there is. Newspapers are huge, and full of stuff that is not interesting to me, or frequently to anybody else: PR stunts dressed as science, tragic but irrelevant tales of people I will never meet which are in no way representative of life in Britain, made up lies masquerading as news, polite reminders that they still haven’t found Madeline McCann (because she’s dead), pages of intractable minutiae about how well rich people I don’t know played games I don’t care about, letters from reactionary right-wing lunatics which Gordon Brown pretends to read in order to placate the dribbling cretins, cartoons that either make no sense at all or make sense but don’t work, and which have such lousy caricatures and opaque references in them that all the people and metaphors have to have the names written on them so we know what’s going on (hint: some politicians have normal-sized ears), conspiracy theories about Diana, horoscopes that would be false even if they were honest, opinion pieces by people I don’t even slightly respect and analyses done by people I have no reason to trust, comics I wouldn’t choose to read, uninteresting gossip about celebrities that I wouldn’t care about even if I thought it were true, news stories I have no reason to believe, propagation of things public figures have said about topics they don’t understand, more wallcharts than I have the wall to accommodate, grainy mobile phone-camera footage and photos of traffic and snow from the public, the uncontested claims of known idiots, and the megalithic monument to sheer, unadulterated pointlessness that is the bridge column. When I do read stories from newspapers, generally online, they come from a variety of sources, mainly the Guardian, the Times, the Independant, and the Telegraph, in roughly that order, and I almost always find them through other people rather than through the newspaper itself.

With my way, I can amass a legion of amateurs (and some professionals) who filter all the news, including some which gets largely ignored by the mass media, and repost the stuff they find interesting. I’m interested in human rights and transparency in government, so I have Amnesty International and mySociety feeding news into my gawping brain. I get interesting stuff from Ben Goldacre’s del.icio.us feed, the National Secular Society’s ‘What The Papers Say’ feed plus blogs like Why Don’t You? and the badsciencebloggers, my more political friends on Facebook and Twitter, and a load of other places. Because they’re mostly unpaid, they’re less likely to copy-paste press releases to fill wordcount, and because there’s a variety of sources, it eliminates all biases except my own (and it cuts down on that by a factor determined by my ineptitude at seeking out sources who share my politics). Large parts of it are still not of interest to me, but the hitrate is far better than TV news, and stories are promoted by interest rather than the whimsy of the media. For example, this story about a twelve year old black girl who is on trial for ‘assault’ after she was beaten up by four police officers who thought she was a prostitute came to my attention via. Graham Linehan (who wrote Father Ted, in case you didn’t know) who saw it on Boing Boing. A quick look at Google News suggests to me that only two newspapers in the world have bothered to report this story. Similarly, the recent furore over MPs’ expenses took place almost entirely outside the mainstream media until after the battle had been won. And Twitter lets me watch celebrities I like having impromptu semi-public discussions of said news: I don’t even need Newsnight any more. Also, I can read clever comics which are neither tired and inane nor thinly veiled adverts for Scott Adams’ side-businesses, and the Guardian even has its crosswords on the website (although as it goes, my brother sets crosswords for his student newspaper so I can even get those through my vast organic Yahoo Pipe if I ask nicely). Keeping my end of the bargain, I share and comment on news stories I find interesting (among many other things) on my Shared Items page, this blog and my Twitter feed, and thus I am part of other people’s vast news-filtering armies (although of course anyone is welcome to leech off the same system if they don’t want to contribute). This is people power working at its best; this is exactly what the Internet is about.

I presume that at some point some of these people must read newspapers. Some of them work for newspapers. If newspapers and TV news went away, I’m less sure where the original, unfiltered news would come from. I presume there are enough people anally reading press releases, Hansard and so forth, and badgering officials with Freedom of Information requests, and enough people inside organisations who are willing to leak things they think the public should know, that the system would still work, especially with WikiLeaks hosting it all on secret servers in places with convenient laws.

Actually, come to think of it, most of the above applies to TV guides as well. This applies to pretty-well every kind of information, including humour, music and interesting trivia. I used to live on my own and feel crushingly bored: I need other people to stop myself going stir-crazy. But now I can fire up the computer and get loads of interesting reading material and discuss it with people I like. I can kill an evening without even trying now. If I go out too much, I get overloaded with stuff when I get back, but a new tiering system I devised solves that. (I have a folder in Google Reader called ‘low priority’. Since you can put a feed in multiple folders, I can mark that as read and instantly delete 75% of my least-likely-to-be-interesting unread items.)

This is the great thing about the internet. It took it a while to find its feet, and I’ve no doubt it will keep getting better, but this is what happens when people can exchange information this easily, and it’s fantastic.