That's exactly what I do. Conversations are my only source of non-tech news. To give some idea of how disconnected I am: I didn't know who won the Super Bowl until the Tuesday after, and I've since forgotten. It's quite pleasant to live like this. Most news is both depressing and completely irrelevant to daily life.

Unless there's a natural disaster nearby, news doesn't really matter to me. My life is affected much more by the next release of io.js than by some Russian G8 membership dispute.[1] And I don't mind being clueless about current events or media. Typically, people are more than willing to summarize important news in conversation, or I can get the gist as others discuss it.

1. Which I only learned about because gravedave mentioned it.