I agree. In Italy basically all the news are just about the coronavirus and nothing else, plus a lot of sensationalism ("we're all gonna die" style), and the Big Brother style press conference every day with the reports of daily numbers of cases, deaths, and recoveries.
It's so aggravating and anxiety inducing that I only check a news roundup in the morning and I shut myself away from any other news sources. Not ideal, but at this point it's the only way to make sure I'm not consumed by the constant stream of bad news.
I have attempted to stay away from news media since around 2018. Around last November, I decided to make a complete cut and stop consuming anything "news related" from secondary sources like podcasts, reddit comment threads etc. I expected that I'd live in ignorance, but I'd gain some peace of mind.
This change has had a far greater impact on me than what I had originally assumed. First surprise is that I still find out everything that's going on in the world that's relevant to me or people I care about. Second, I feel like I turned sober for the first time in years - I've had soo much creativity and mental energy that bloomed out of nowhere within a few days after I stopped punishing my thought process with news from the world.
There are a few things I have discovered in the past few months. First, if you put in effort to find very high quality information about an event that you hear about, you will usually find something from primary sources that are orders of magnitude better than anything that's published on popular media. Second, there really aren't that many new things happening in the world all the time - 30 mins of effort a week is usually sufficient to be on top of everything going on.
There are a ton of people who will convince you that it's your moral duty to follow news as closely as possible. It's totally not worth it.
One thing that has suprised me is the lack of any non-virus news that is around. The virus and it's fallout can't be the only thing happening in the world at the moment! The only non-virus related news I've seen over the last couple of weeks is a couple of local court cases and North Korea firing something into the ocean. Oh and we had a local government election here in Queensland which got about an inch of coverage.
This tells me that most of the normal news we get fed is pretty much non-essential filler.
I’ve regressed a bit with news subreddits under 30 minutes a day, and will read links from friends, but I’ve found that it’s mostly propaganda.
> There are a ton of people who will convince you that it's your moral duty to follow news as closely as possible. It's totally not worth it.
Most “news” is either PR or propaganda. So is “your duty” to keep consuming it.
Side note: I buy all the Australian newspapers during the Christmas holiday and force myself to go through it, and it’s always a reminder how it’s all a waste of time.
And yet you're commenting here, in a news-related comment thread?
There's a limit to well I can self-isolate, and I'm sure I'm already taking every possible precaution. Being more anxious will accomplish nothing.
It’s useful also for non-pandemic times.
I wish we'd talk more about the effects of the media's reporting style on psychological health. Do we really need headlines and reports about individual deaths every day, live tickers, and an unending amount of notifications and newsletters regarding the same?
For people with anxiety disorders it can be total hell right now (talking from experience), and it's much less because of the virus itself than the reporting.
Curious about this term - is that the back-translated version of "Big Brother" from 1984?
Today I refused to switch on the tv and somehow nothing spectacular happened. I hope we are done with this news nonsense.
Radio is a bit better.
All the best for Italy, we were supposed to be in a week on vacation near Genua :(
We are closely watching you and hope your downtrend is real. All the best, ciao!
Thanks for the kind words. I actually did not even hear about a down trend ...
One point I want to add to what I wrote before: this stream of news can also be detrimental to interpersonal relationships during a long quarantine.
Long-term confinement can already strain some relationships, the news can make things even worse. Another point to avoid talking about it among family members.
The children are teenagers and they have enough work from school to keep them busy. They also have me handy, so we talk about their work quite often.
They also help with the house more than usual.
If it was not for the food which is a pain in the bottom to get, and the fact that one cannot do sport outside (biking for instance) it would not be bad at all for us (I am talking about our specific case)
It is true that we do not discuss the pandemy itself too much (as there is not much to discuss)
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BRITISH_FIELD_SERVIC...
I've been a little overloaded by metric in tech for the past several years to the point that I sometimes call out metrics getting added as unactionable. There's a cult of metric collection because we can, not because there's anything meaningful there.
Surely it's a planning consideration for the commanders? I think they get world news so that they can inform their decision if they need to decide for example where they go if they can't contact London.
So using it as a “sign of civilization” (one of multiple) sounds quaint, but with a perfectly logical reason behind it.
The person you're replying to is talking about the impossibility of faking a day of idiomatic BBC Radio 4 broadcasting, and I'm inclined to agree that the individual personalities and programmes are so incredibly ingrained in most British minds and the details are so subtle that you'd have no chance of being convincing.
[1] https://ia800108.us.archive.org/9/items/OperationAspidistra/...
You only need a half-decent microphone.
You could do it on a bad microphone if you wanted!
The Archers is a timeless part of the background noise in many family kitchens in the UK. Seems a shame not to fight through this little piece of calm for normal families in this time of crisis.
If BBC4 goes down, but you're still able to call London on a satellite phone, you don't go nuking Russia. If you have a half dozen different signs of nuclear war and BBC4 is down, it's a point in the "well shit" direction.
So if Northwood goes silent, but the cricket is uninterupted, there's probably something wrong with Northwood. If everything's gone, there's probably something wrong with your radio. But if Northwood's gone, the BBC's gone, but VOA is still up .. you start wondering if something's wrong with the UK.
(For example. I'm not privy to anything the rest of us aren't. But it's clear that it's an item on a checklist that happens to have some novelty value, rather than being our "systema perimetr".)
Radio and satellite comms on the periscopes, among other things.
The major countries all have thousands of merchant vessels traveling in every major shipping lane all over the world. My thinking is navies would be worried about these ships being equipped with sensors that analyze satellite signals looking for what could be intended for submarine communication. Eaves droppers wouldn't even need to break the encryption of the signal, they'd only need to be aware of a signal is being broadcast to only a specific region of the the ocean and that bears other attributes associated with military communication.
Broadcasting over a larger area reduces the ability of an adversary to infer location from the signal, but increases the likelihood of intercept. That alone might not be terribly useful, but it can be combined with other bits of information and form a more complete picture. For example, if you know when and where the sub was last docked, fleet movements, regional events that are of military interest, and you have a signal with a message you suspect was intended for them, then that's enough bits of information to be useful.
There are trade-offs. If you're required to minimize the the likelihood of discovery at all costs, then it makes sense to never even attempt communication while underway.
That would require you to be able to decrypt the encrypted signal that the satellite is broadcasting. Which you can't.
All these third party observers see is a bunch of digital noise continuously being broadcast by the satellites. They have no way of telling digital noise destined for a particular sub from the rest of the digital noise. So the signals convey no useful information to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines
The article confirms this:
> Salles said the situation now will be toughest for any crews that leave harbor in the weeks ahead, because they’ll know they are leaving loved ones in the midst of the pandemic and, possibly, still living in lockdown. The French government has already extended its stay-home orders once, to April 15, and said it could do so again.
> Salles said he believes those crews will get regular coronavirus updates, but won’t be told of any family deaths until they are returning to the l’Ile Longue submarine base, near Brest in Brittany.
The test for Huntington’s (a genetic disease that is 100% fatal and usually starts in your 30s or 40s) might be a good analogue. You’d think everyone would want to know (50% chance if one your parents has it). But IIRC, less than 50% get the test.
My father worked aboard one, and we got to send a weekly “familygram” message - a short, telegram-style message where you put one word in each box until you’re out of boxes, and then mail it off to the Navy. You weren’t allowed to even hint at any bad news - not even that the dog had died - and we were told that any bad news would be removed from the message. And receiving a too-short, redacted, or no familygram at all would probably be more worrying than not being told at all.
The reality of it is that if you’re half-way through a 10-week patrol, there’s nothing about this pandemic that’s remotely useful to you. Nothing you can do, nothing you can say, no way you can benefit from this information. It’s 100% useless mental overhead.
And to be honest, I think I’m a little jealous right now. I don’t think 100% news saturation is good for us either.