
What’s so new about news? - kawera
https://aeon.co/essays/news-has-never-been-pristine-always-entangled-in-time
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niftich
We feel more engrossed in the Happenings of the world when they're directly
relevant to our life and limb and the welfare of our family and friends. This
is the sensation the author appears to have been experiencing during the
Bataclan attacks; the spontaneous ad-hoc information-sharing networks that
develop after such crises are enduring and timeless, as the author's research
reveals -- especially when such crises are relatively rare, such that we are
not yet conditioned to "accept" them.

Despite an enchanting retrospective on the moods of news-consumers and news-
suppliers throughout the ages and across the world, as well as a recap of the
less-than-flattering Eurocentric malobversations of olden times, the essay's
sophistication ends here; not really making or refuting a coherent point about
modern news and how it relates to anything that was said. Seemingly, the
implication is that some have suggested that "current panic about false news"
is in part because of peer-to-peer dissemination of news made easier by
today's social media, though it's not clear until the last paragraph that the
essay set out to disprove this particular hypothesis.

The article recounts that peer-to-peer spread of news has been commonplace for
as long as people communicated at all, notwithstanding whether organizations
came together to process sources, gather facts, and disseminate them many-to-
one; but otherwise falsely equates others' incredulity at manufactured
fiction, misleading reporting, and cargo-cult cognitive dissonance with his
post-adrenaline sensory overload of trying to make sense of nearly becoming a
piece of news himself; that, I think, is too much of a reach.

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SmooL
An interesting, high level view about how people respond/react to news.

"The current panic about false news, then, does not tell us much about the
role of social media in sharing information. It reveals, instead, that we feel
like change is accelerating unpredictably and that we are looking for ways to
make sense of it."

While fake news is certainly nothing new, social media and technology has
certainly abetted the proliferation of fake news.

I've found people in general are trusting, and willing to believe what they
heard, without checking/verifying the source. "Don't believe everything you
see on the internet" is an (relatively) old adage that most people know and
believe they follow, but the large growth of fake news is a real sign that
that clearly isn't the case. I feel this also may be part of the current
panic.

