C Or D: being really out of it and not knowing what the hell is going on in the world

how out of it are you? i'm pretty out of it. no cable t.v. for almost two years. don't really read the papers much. i didn't know who was playing in the super bowl on the day of the super bowl. i hear little bits and pieces here and there. i know there is a debate about rape culture somewhere. i still read stuff when people provide links on here or facebook. it doesn't take long to get up to speed. but i'm getting more and more okay with not being up to speed. when we lived on an island i couldn't get enough info. books, papers, magazines, websites, any and everything. felt really disconnected. the disconnect is starting to feel kinda comfy.

i totally aspire to this.

really? why? i don't think i ever did. just kinda happened. i guess people can feel overloaded and want to disconnect for a while, but they usually go back into battle sooner rather than later. the more i stay away the more i want to stay away. i don't think i will end up like one of THOSE people. you know, the judgy no t.v. people. i watch too much netflix for that to ever happen. but i am probably more dismissive of pop culture and definitely american media in general than i used to be. i used to revel in the muck and mire. the seediness. i really really really don't miss charlie rose. i will just say that out of the blue. also, when you don't see t.v. commercials every day your brain changes. i don't know how, but it changes.

I work for a newspaper, so I obviously spend a big part of my day/life "knowing," but yeah most days it's too much trouble to know about North Korea and Monsanto and The Dark Knight Rises and dubstep and I just zone out and watch old films noir on Netflix.

I'm sort of in it as far as dumb fun disposalbe culture ways go, but in other aspect sI'm way more out of it than I should be, especially politics/world affairs. I try every now and again but i'm fighting an inherent laziness that urges me to think that it's better not to know which is terrible

it's kind of dud. I've been rethinking this a lot lately

i think i aspire to it since i know the things that make me feel satisfied and genuinely content are things that are very far away from being "connected." this isn't really an ethically defensible desire (tho i guess i could argue that people "disconnecting" a bit more from the endless churning of media cycles is an ethically important act).

i don't think its really about it being "trouble" to keep up with current events. but the absence of cable t.v. had a profound effect on my life. i'd been watching network t.v. for 42 years and when it went away all of a sudden all kinds of things didn't mean as much to me. this also coincided with me not being able to listen to NPR anymore in the car. drove me up a wall. in the car. i don't buy magazines anymore either cuz where i am there are just dumb drug stores with bad magazine selections. i used to be a magazine and newspaper junkie. the crankiness i feel reading the new york times just came with age, i think. but it all adds up to lots of netflix. basically.

xxx=post

it is kind of a political decision, i guess. even though it just kinda feels normal to me now and not much of a decision. i was definitely addicted to t.v. my whole life and was happy being addicted.

there are good reasons to be really out of it, and that's fine. but actively reveling in ignorance is pretty much always a dud.

also, when you don't see t.v. commercials every day your brain changes. i don't know how, but it changes.

i kind of agree!

i started a thread a while back on similar themes but more targeted on the internet:
The Information Diet

i feel v weird even saying it out loud, but mine's totally by choice. I have cable, I can easily engage, but I just...stopped. I think the last time I really, seriously engaged in politics/what's going on was the financial collapse and I made myself crazy wtih it, not sleeping, obsessively listening/reading anything I coudl get my hands on. I know there's a balance in the middle where I don't have to choose between all/nothing but I get v emotionally connected because, well, it's stuff that potentially affects your life in all kinds of ways

that's why I feel so conflicted about dropping out. this should be stuff that I engage with, as someone who generally participates in society in basic ways.

idk

yeah, any time someone is REALLY happy and proud to not know stuff is major dud. that's what i meant about the no-t.v. people. the people who pretend that they don't even know what a t.v. is.

xx-post

proud no tv watchers or just proudly ignorant people (I DON'T READ THE NEWS IT'S SO NEGATIVE) are the duddest of dud.

it bothers me that there's some point at which that line blurs and I'm kind of one of them, minus the pride though. that's the sobering thought that makes me feel like I need to reconsider this whole thing

proudly ignorant is one thing but i think you can make a case that being informed of a national news agenda isn't some imperative of citizenship either. i think The News is pretty much bullshit/social manipulation/distortion of your personal worldspace but hey what isn't? engage with what interests you and ignore what doesn't and don't expect backslaps for either.

i think you can be interested and engaged with the World in lots of positive ways that don't involve following the news cycle, and sometimes following the news might give people a sense of engagement that doesn't really stand up?

I feel like I've always been and always will be pretty out of it in a lot of different ways. like not being culturally in sync with the majority of people.

but I hate to say I'm also not sure I see the value in following the news. I've thought about it a lot and kind of struggled with it, but I kind of philosophically believe that it's not important.

i wd guess huge swathes of the world's population manage their lives just fine without following regular news broadcasts

proudly ignorant is one thing but i think you can make a case that being informed of a national news agenda isn't some imperative of citizenship either.

I have gone through recent periods where I have wanted to just drop my attention to the national news. I mean, there are so many things to pay attention to in this world. Maybe if I didn't spend time worrying about what congress thinks about the budget or the thousands of dead pigs floating around a chinese river or the whole stupid benghazi thing or whatever, I could concentrate on things that make me happy. Improve at hobbies or my job or something.

I am paying attention to crazy dramas that I have no control over, but they are mostly business as usual. Maybe I should spend time learning how to fix duct work instead.

duty to keep up = dud; but if you find it intrinsically interesting then it's as good a hobby as any other passive activity

that's how i break it down, more or less. plus a healthy distrust that what comes up on TV once an hour is the stuff that really matters.

i feel genuinely stressed if i disconnect for too long. i mean these days i sometimes end up being offline for over 30hrs and i'm like fuuuuuuuuck what's happened what do i need to read

you do have to pick & choose though, i don't watch tv (not b/c i look down on it, i just don't like it/it doesn't fit into my lifestyle) so i ignore all that stuff apart from tangentially noting names/titles/lena dunham's latest racism.

idk to an extent isn't it about what you're actually interested in? like...scott, were you actually a superbowl fan in the first place? if you weren't why should you care about not knowing who's in the final? i don't know who's in the big rugby or football matches this year because i don't care. if one year i didn't know who was playing the wimbledon final...i can't even imagine that because i can't imagine not caring.

and tbh i understand why disconnection might be attractibe but tbh saying something like "oh there's a debate about rape culture" i guess in such a hand-wavey, dismissive way just seems dickish, like you think it's just some minor kerfuffle that only saddoes would argue about, rather than something which is REALLY IMPORTANT TO THE SOCIETY WE LIVE IN.

yeah as i think i was getting at in the other thread, if you're not going for monkhood then it's about creating a controllable and personally manageable space. or switching from a "tv or radio always on" to selectively consuming media.

Last week my dad asked me if I knew there was a new pope.

So, I guess maybe I sometimes give the impression that I am somewhat out of touch but YES I KNEW THERE WAS A NEW POPE GAWD.

There's this weird forced grin quality to SNL sketches and wait wait don't tell me banter that makes me think the occupational obligation to constantly be plugged into the spam vortex of news and pop culture wears down on people.

This is 100% dud for me because if I turned inward and had only my own navel to contemplate, I'd have killed myself long ago. I won't project that onto anyone else, except for people who have really stupid and deranged social/political views of the world and disengage with it so they can't be proved wrong.

I'm so thrilled to have time to be way more connected now that all I do is click through links in articles and leave tabs open to read later, it almost amounts to actual work (except I'm not creating anything out of it--yet?) but it's highly specific media choices, certainly not like local or television news coverage. Besides:

http://www.salon.com/2013/03/18/report_local_news_somehow_even_worse_than_it_was_before/

Knowing the name of the prime minister of Thailand or whether there is a coup attempt in Burkina Faso has no intrinsic good or evil content. I know tens of thousands of things I will never put to any use. Having some sort of picture of what the world is like beyond the immediate confines of your senses is certainly classic, but it can be accomplished by other means than sucking at the teat of the 24-hour news cycle.

As I get old I'm losing interest in the details of world news, if only because they are extremely repetitious. There's value in knowing about a massive tsunami in the Indian Ocean, assassination attempt in Bulgaria, or a barbaric war in the Congo, but I no longer eagerly seek all the details of each newsworthy event as i once did, because they follow patterns I've seen often and the details rarely add much that is new to me.

I don't know anything about pop culture anymore. I don't know of any new music, I don't know who these people on SNL are anymore, I don't know who the actress is who tripped at the Oscars, I didn't watch the Oscars, I can't remember who won the World Series, I learn about things like Gangnam Style and Harlem Shake through the YouTube parody videos first.

I don't want to be the guy who's all "Macklemore? Feh, never heard of them," but that's exactly where I'm at right now. I've always wondered how my dad could've gone through the entire 1970s without buying a Led Zeppelin album, but now I get the idea.

I am hip to all the latest kids cartoons. You should see my boy lose his shit whenever he watches Pengu on the iPad.

sorry didn't mean to seem like a jerk about rape its just sometimes there are things that pop up for a week or two and everyone is supposed to have an opinion/argument and then it goes away from facebook/the news/whatever and you have to decide whether you want to be a part of the argument and start following the argument/story and nowadays i just don't feel like trying to keep up? the instant outrage that quickly disappears just bugs me. eternal problems that get talked about for a news cycle and then go away...ugh.

and no i'm not a huge american football fan - i followed it for years when i lived in philly and then kinda stopped when i moved/got married. but this was the first time i could remember where i had no clue what was going on and its a big deal here and usually by osmosis you pick stuff up about it.

lexxx-post

I am the guy who's all "Macklemore? Feh, never heard of them."

I know a lot about all that other stuff despite not having TV for almost 2 years.

pp it's Pingu surely

I don't want to be the guy who's all "Macklemore? Feh, never heard of them,"

yes you do. I used to be that guy. I wish I could go back to those days.

i'm on the internet a lot - obviously - but its almost entirely ilx/facebook/record-related stuff now. those three things are at least 80% of my internet time. i read the food section of the nyt. that's about it. or hilarious articles linked to on the quiddities thread. the onion is apparently the only newspaper i need to see online. the internet has definitely taken the place of the constant channel-clicking thing of watching cable t.v.

I don't know anything about pop culture anymore. I don't know of any new music, I don't know who these people on SNL are anymore, I don't know who the actress is who tripped at the Oscars, I didn't watch the Oscars, I can't remember who won the World Series, I learn about things like Gangnam Style and Harlem Shake through the YouTube parody videos first.

I don't want to be the guy who's all "Macklemore? Feh, never heard of them,"

the funny thing about all of this stuff is that you could know everything you need to know about all of it in about 10 minutes worth of googling.

same is true with most of the news really. following it day to day as it happens is exhausting and pointless

I googled Macklemore two minutes ago, read the first para of wikipedia article and sated my entire appetite for knowing who he is or what he does.

I don't have a tv but I don't feel 'out of it' cause I read a lot of news stuff

I prob would kinda be out of it w/r/t pop culture if I didn't read ilx tho

I googled Macklemore two minutes ago, read the first para of wikipedia article and sated my entire appetite for knowing who he is or what he does.

see you can't escape this stuff. a thread about being out of it led you to learning about something you had no interest in!

Mostly I learned about my extreme lack of interest.

But I really don't care who these people are. I'm not being Tuomas here, going "Who is this Macklemore? If only there was a way I could discover this strange, obscure artist."

not caring who macklemore is makes you a normal person

but if you don't care why are you in here talking about macklemore at all? i know about not caring about things and it doesn't involve bringing them up unprompted

Every day I learn how normal, ordinary, unremarkable and pedestrian I am, as an unavoidable side effect of ilx.

http://www.amazon.com/Twelve-One-Room-Cabin-Beyond-American/dp/1577318978
read this and was totally jealous, except that my ideal version would also include NY Times delivery every morning

I ditched cable when the price went up too much, now have Amazon+Netflix+HBO Go via friends accounts - if my TV dies I don't think I'm going to replace it at all and cut back on that consumption even further. For all the Golden Age of TV blah blah blah, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything by missing Mad Men or Modern Family or the other recent shows I haven't seen.
Don't feel like I could go completely detached from news/etc. if only via osmosis.

it's really hard to give an example of something you don't care about without using a word and this time the word was 'macklemore'

xxxpost lex tbf you bring up cooking an awful lot :)

I'd never heard of Macklemore until there was a story about them on NPR a few weeks ago.

thread now amply demonstrating the peril of exposure to inconsequential information.

I never heard of macklemore until I did. funny how that works

I owe thanks to 'rolling worst songs' thread for occasionally keeping my finger on the pulse of what ppl are going to inexplicably love

if you don't mind people saying "you haven't heard about that!!??" then it works pretty well to let other people filter everything for you. I got a "you didn't hear about the comet in russia!?" from a friend the other day but now I've heard about it and it didn't take any effort on my part.

I think it's classic, mostly because I am old enough to remember the OJ trial and how much of my time I (and millions of others) devoted to knowing what was going on day by day in that trial. that time was wasted and i regret spending it that way. at the time it seemed important as part of "knowing what wa going on in the world."

I feel like it's probably healthier in some respects, given how much information is out there, to consider constant consumption of information media to be less a "finding out what's going on" than it is burying your head in a particular plot of sand. the line between something being "knowledge" (and all the metaphysical or pragmatic connotations you might assign to that word) or merely a form of ignorance (knowing X meanings not knowing Y) seems increasingly hard to determine.

my laptop is on its last laplegs - the colors are all psychedelic and purple and stuff and this makes things hard to read and sometimes it doesn't start - and i haven't really been bringing it home at night. and we don't have a computer at home unless you count maria's phone or the netflix slowass internet channel or rufus's kindle and i don't use any of those and ANYWAY...it's been nice. reading more. listening to records and devoting all my attention to the music. kinda peaceful. sometimes i'll just sit on the couch and watch the kids play mario for an hour. i don't actually play with them or anything, but i will watch them play mario. and i've been reading a cool book to them at night.

oh but anyway my point was: i don't miss anything. by not having my computer at night. its all the same stuff. on here. on facebook. its all still there. its there the next day when i go to work. i forget that!

my laptop is on its last laplegs - the colors are all psychedelic and purple and stuff and this makes things hard to read

you are gonna hurt yr eyes

kinda wondered if maybe that was how skot sees everything these days? ;)

I didn't find out that Bin Laden had been killed until 2 days after the event, and then it was by noticing the thread on ilx had like 300 new answers or something. Was definitely at least somewhat informed about politics maybe ten years ago compared to now. It takes up enough of my day catching up with sports news/gossip that I can't be bothered with actual news.

About two-thirds of me is reasonably connected, in part because of things like ILX and my students. Let's say I'm no more than a month or two behind on most things, and even if I still haven't heard Kendrick Lamar, I know he's out there. (So okay, sometimes more than a month or two.) For the things I care about--music, films, and baseball--I'm not as connected as I was in 1985, but I do okay.

The other third lives in a dream world occupied by music and films and willowy goddesses from 40 years ago. And Al Hrabosky, he's somewhere in there too.