Unplugged

I've more or less stopped following the news. A couple of weeks ago I unsubscribed from NPR's daily five-minute news-summary podcast, after four years of listening, and that basically severed me from the world of regular general-interest updates. Through the internet, and through internet-enabled friends, I find that most things I care about will filter their way to me through other channels quickly enough, while things I don't care about stop competing for my attention.

The danger here lay in shutting myself away from serendipitous discovery. You benefit from information that, while of no obvious value at first, nonetheless takes up residence in your brain, mingles with with other whims and fancies for a while, and eventually dope-slaps you with a freshly synthesized new Idea one day, while you're walking down the street. I live for this phenomenon, and I don't want to endanger its frequency in my own head by narrowing the flow of my information intake.

But I'm willing to wager that the time and attention I'll save avoiding non-genre news outweighs the risk that I'll miss any gems buried in the garbage heaps of trite infojunk. So long as I'm careful to stay plugged in, and keep my list of active info-channels well groomed, I think I'll be OK.