You can get somebody's version of practically anything going on anywhere in the world within seconds. It's easy, to some degree it's interesting, and it's viewed as a good thing to be in the loop. It's difficult to see why tuning in to the news for half an hour every morning would be a bad thing both from a micro and a macro perspective.
What does being informed do for you? It gives you something to talk about on the bus, and...well that's about it. Very, very rarely does something in your life change only because you know about it. There is no cat in a box that lives or dies based on your accurate knowledge of the happenings of the world. Nations will still go to war, schools will still be shot up by their students, and politicians will still be giving speeches. It's just not relevant for you to know about any of it. Ignorance would change your daily life insomuch as you have to find some other use for your time than to watch and/or argue about the news.
What good is a partially informed populace? Invariably people will get a partial and skewed telling of the story, and cannot possibly be expected to form a valid opinion based on the evidence - much less express an inter or intranationally relevant opinion. How much better could a partially informed partial people be compared to an ignorantly objective one? Seems like a pretty solid coin toss either way to me.
So what, people are supposed to be blind to everything around them? No, it's just that the concrete is not nearly important as we make it out to be for most of us. The ideas that eventually form the concrete circumstances are what is important - natural laws of human behavior that are every bit as real as the laws of physics, if more difficult to accurately analyze. Looking at the base cause of events is important, not their inevitable outcome. Asimov wrote about a science where mathematics could be used on large populations to predict future events; we may not have it down to a science, but it's not difficult to see a chain of astoundingly simple causes and effects if one is willing to go deep enough to look for it. Reacting on the present in context of the future is a lot better than reacting on the past in context of the present.
What does being informed do for you? It gives you something to talk about on the bus, and...well that's about it. Very, very rarely does something in your life change only because you know about it. There is no cat in a box that lives or dies based on your accurate knowledge of the happenings of the world. Nations will still go to war, schools will still be shot up by their students, and politicians will still be giving speeches. It's just not relevant for you to know about any of it. Ignorance would change your daily life insomuch as you have to find some other use for your time than to watch and/or argue about the news.
What good is a partially informed populace? Invariably people will get a partial and skewed telling of the story, and cannot possibly be expected to form a valid opinion based on the evidence - much less express an inter or intranationally relevant opinion. How much better could a partially informed partial people be compared to an ignorantly objective one? Seems like a pretty solid coin toss either way to me.
So what, people are supposed to be blind to everything around them? No, it's just that the concrete is not nearly important as we make it out to be for most of us. The ideas that eventually form the concrete circumstances are what is important - natural laws of human behavior that are every bit as real as the laws of physics, if more difficult to accurately analyze. Looking at the base cause of events is important, not their inevitable outcome. Asimov wrote about a science where mathematics could be used on large populations to predict future events; we may not have it down to a science, but it's not difficult to see a chain of astoundingly simple causes and effects if one is willing to go deep enough to look for it. Reacting on the present in context of the future is a lot better than reacting on the past in context of the present.
