The News is Largely Useless

8 years ago in high school, I was posed with this essay topic for my philosophy class:

(Paraphrased) "The usefulness of knowledge is its ability to be used"

I never did end up writing an essay on this because I thought that the statement was inherently obvious. I looked at it, it was obvious and there was nothing more for me to say. But it seems today, years later that I've come back to visit this statement.

In my spare time (when ever I have 15~30 minutes to kill) I find myself popping on to places like the BBC, slashdot or Canada.com to read up on news in general. The sad thing is that most of the time I spent reading was largely wasted.

If you were to pick up a cookbook, found a recipe for cheese cake and by the end of the day made a nice batch of cheese cake to share would you call that useful? I would-- you picked up a book, read it and acquired a new skill (what you do with it, of course is a different story, but let us not go off in that direction because it is beyond the scope of this essay). You could do the same for many different things from home maintenance to solid state physics. Sure you might not use everything that you learn, but the character of the information learned is the type of information that is ment to be used.

The nature of news on the other hand is different, in that the knowledge presented is descriptive (and ideally, unbiased). I could tell you right now, that I have a bottle of orange juice on my desk along side several trays of processed silicon wafers. The information I provided you with just right now, would be an example of that kind of descriptive information. I could tell you that yesterday I went home early (about 8:00 pm) because I was tired and needed to catch up on sleep, that would be no less descriptive either. The news is more or less the same, just the events and topics are different. Instead of you guys reading about my life in Japan, you might be reading about the world events such as British politics or more local things like "Radio chips [keeping] track of citizens [in Canada]".

For the most of you readers out there today, let me ask you a question: given the news that you read, what are *you* going to do or can *you* do about the things you read? My guess at the answer is that +95% of the time we can't do anything or don't do anything about it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a defeatist, quite the opposite actually, but the for the most part, what we read in the news is quite and completely useless.

Take for example of the radio chip article I posted from Canada.com webpage. Go read it and come back if you like. It's quite typical for as the news you might read. Interestingly the news always talk about problems of some sort, whether if it's murder, crime, politics, taxes or whatever. The news seems to be all about complaining.

The radio chip article? Well the long and short of the story is that some "large Canadian" companies have started using these chips to track people in their stores. The article doesn't go directly to say which companies are doing it, nor do they talk about any direct sources from Industry that mention about it. They just say that the Canadian privacy commissioner is looking into it and an interview of some random marketing professors are going off on how useful information could be for these large companies and some "privacy expert" is talking about the problems of these tags being used to track customers.

After reading this article, I'd like to ask you-- was this information useful? Sure, most of us probably don't like the idea of being tracked by a large corporation without knowing how exactly RFID tracking information can be used and sure it may instill an uneasy feeling for you readers and you might end up complaining/talking about it to friends... but is there something that you can do about it? are you going to do something about it? If the answer is "no" to both questions then you've just been a victim to useless information. I'm so sorry, but the time you've wasted reading that article (and many articles like that) has been irrevocably lost. If you want to read useful information, do something with it.

I hope you found this essay useful :)

Endnote: There is also the class of information that you might read about now and use later on that I didn't talk about (ie. knowledge becoming useful later). For the most part, the news doesn't even fall into that category either so I've left out that part of this discussion.

Sidenote: Curious about how I get my ideas? I try applying what I think to different topics and look at the implications. My next potential essay could be on "what makes a useful person" (this is an interesting topic and probably has plenty of interesting implications). If you've got the time, try writing about it and post it somewhere. I may write my own when I'm in the mood.