Honestly? I'm not. I personally browse a few news sites, hacker news, etc, but I'm in the minority.
Facebook is doing a very fine job of being the first place people hear about stuff happening. It's one website, and it will give you exactly the news you care about- big stories side by side with your friends' random musings. They've aggregated all information that a person cares about in one place, personalized, custom-fit, nothing you don't care about.
I'm not calling that a good thing, but I do think it's true.
There's a MacDonald's in every city in the planet, and it's literally killing us from how unhealthy it is, but good god I keep going back every now and then. Same idea as Facebook.
You may have a point about facebook, but I have to disagree about McDonald's. Many, many people eat tons of McDonald's and live to a ripe old age, including Warren Buffet, my great aunt (now 103), and countless others.
Yes, you can make a strong argument that eating ONLY McDonald's is unhealthy (though others have done the opposite in various documentaries), but if you're going to say that McDonald's is "literally" killing us, you'll need to back it up with a mountain of evidence. Anecdotes aside, the places with the greatest longevity also tend to have a lot of McDonalds restaurants. The top McDonald's eating countries (per capita) outside the US are Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, Hong Kong, Canada and France—some of the longest living people in the world!
If they're "literally" being killed by the food, it sure takes a long time to do its damage!
Its how some people get all those things. Not people who care enough to get their news directly from a number of sources, instead of via the Facebook filter.
Even if you don't get your information from Facebook, if enough people do, then Facebook can influence the outcomes of elections which directly affect your life. If you are a plumber who doesn't use Facebook, and Facebook promotes a bunch of content that foments anti-plumber sentiments, you may be attacked on the street by an angry mob of Facebook users.
It is not possible to design your life so that you completely avoid the influence of an entity as large and powerful as Facebook, just like the citizens of most countries cannot design their lives in a way that fully avoids the influence of the U.S. government.
to be completely honest, having the time and energy to stay well-informed on current events from a variety of sources is a privilege. working-class and poor people have neither the time nor mental energy to peruse a variety of sources. the reason i say this is not to tell you to "check your privilege", by the way. it's to make the argument that facebook's shaping of the zeitgeist primarily affects the impoverished and working classes - the people who bear the brunt of all policy decisions, the people who need to be well-informed the most.
Looking beyond Facebook for news and reporting on diverse topics with balanced viewpoints is a "privilege"?
On what can you possibly base this claim? This is why Internet.org and the walled garden got nuked. This is what we really mean when we talk about network neutrality. You type a URL into the address bar and press enter, and the page you requested loads.
While certainly there are populations where internet access is not readily available, that doesn't appear to be your argument. "working-class and poor people have neither the time nor mental energy to peruse a variety of sources" is a bizarre claim I can't quite get my head around.
> "working-class and poor people have neither the time nor mental energy to peruse a variety of sources" is a bizarre claim I can't quite get my head around.
Consider the possibility that this difficulty lies not with the claim, but with your head.
The real value of money is that you can use it in place of time. The less of it you have, the more time you must spend on dealing with problems that you could make go away much more quickly and easily otherwise. The converse is also true.
That's why people say that it's a privilege to be able to gather a balanced view of the world. I would not say the same, because the rhetoric of privilege is inseparable from personal attack, and making people feel uneasy and defensive is inimical to worthwhile discourse. But when people use that lazy cliché in this context, that is what they mean.
> the rhetoric of privilege is inseparable from personal attack
Is this a generational point of view? I don't think that the word "privilege" is "inseperable from personal attack. To me, this very much fits into the definition of a privilege as "a benefit enjoyed by a person, beyond the advantages of most". Access to and time to read a broad variety of news sources is very much a benefit enjoyed by some people, beyond the advantages of most. I don't see how there's any personal attack implicit in that...
I've observed people to respond very badly when I use it, and as best I can tell, that's why.
I speak to communicate with people - that's communicate with, not talk to, and if you're unclear on the distinction, any dictionary with etymological information will serve you.
Talking about other people's opinions, behaviors, and beliefs in terms of privilege makes communicating with them harder instead of easier. So it's not worth my while to do.
> The real value of money is that you can use it in place of time.
This is true to a point, but you stretch it to an absolutism. As if, a lack of money by definition means a lack of time, which is most certainly false. In many ways, having more money increases demands on your time, and this can hold true up through even Larry Page levels of wealth.
Working-class and poor people; many often hold a much more balanced world-view than the wealthy or elite. And yes, many of them used the internet to access diverse viewpoints mixed with their life experience in order to help arrive at those viewpoints.
I think net worth is very loosely correlated with some of the things you seem to think net worth is strongly correlated with.
I love Hacker News! I can't imagine where else it might happen that a Silicon Valley startup founder would explain to a mouthy unlettered Mississippi redneck what it's like to be poor or working class. Thank you for that!
The bad idea that a free walled garden is better than nothing, or that it's worth sacrificing network neutrality in order to increase overall access.
And to give a little more background, Facebook was trying to get free "internet" access away in India, but it wasn't really internet access it was actually just a Facebook walled garden. The local population organized and ultimately the government rightly told them to piss off.
Because being able to access a diverse set of viewpoints on the Internet is not, actually, a "privilege" but rather the central point of the whole affair.
No, the people making the policy decisions need to be better informed. It doesn't much matter if you suffer them and don't have the time to go campaigning your grievances. The sword cuts on both sides: the poor don't have political power because they don't have the luxury needed to wield it, not because they are uninformed of the state of affairs.
FWIW, I read that as: The poor people are the ones who elect the people making the decisions to those decision-making posts. In that sense, the voters are the ones who need to be informed on the issues _(and_ on where the candidates stand on the issues), in order to be able to vote for candidates who know and care about the same issues the voters do.