[Eyght]

> The need to be “in the know” was powerful, but I realized that I was consuming vast amounts of shallow information that resulted in shallow, uninformed opinions.

I'd like to applaud you for admitting this to yourself. I feel like a vital part of successfully navigating the internet age is to realize this very fact.

[fancyfish]

This is a good way to look at it. I’ve given up Twitter and much shortform news for mental health, and haven’t had a good response to others saying it’s my “duty” as a citizen to stay informed.

You can stay just as informed without giving in to doombait articles. You are just as valuable in the public sphere if you don’t succumb to attaching yourself to the firehose of daily information and tweets.

[kortilla]

Another way to view it is that being “informed” isn’t some singular state you can achieve. People who read every article churned out by a news site daily are no more “informed” than people who just read the laws as they are voted on by the government.

The latter will not seem “informed” because they won’t know about some controversial statement that set the Internet on fire, but they will certainly be more informed about the consequential actions being taken by the government.

TLDR - being “informed” has no relationship to following what currently classifies a news - at least from an “informed citizen” perspective.