[untog]

What actionable information has following the minute of the NSA revelations provided me?

Encrypt your data better, perhaps. But that's kind of besides the point - are you suggesting that there is no point knowing about things you have no control over?

[aaronem]

Are you suggesting there is some point? That there's real value, to oneself or to anyone else, in repeatedly dismaying oneself over things which one does not have, and cannot obtain, the power to affect?

[untog]

I suppose I just can't imagine being content at being ignorant of the world. By that principle surely it's also worthless to learn about world history?

[aaronem]

Not in the slightest; the mistake there would lie not in studying the dead past, but rather in taking it personally enough to experience dismay. Taking sides in the past is pointless; one studies the past to take sides in the present.

I also want to pick on the fallacy I find in your equation of largely ignoring journalism and being ignorant of the world. Having in early life studied journalism without reference to history, and then later studied history without reference to journalism, I found the former to leave me bewildered in a morass of facts with no useful means of assembling from them a coherent picture of the world, and the latter to furnish me with the cognitive mechanisms necessary to derive a coherent, if of course not perfectly accurate, model, into which to fit the facts I derive from review of what I am forced to conclude is the rather slapdash and careless journalistic profession.

[jmagoon]

It's probably hard to have a general rule about something like that. My take away from the article was that much of the current news that we consume isn't particularly useful to us--it doesn't improve the way we think or act, it just makes us sad and afraid.

Like, say, watching a report about a kidnapped child. Or reading about the trial of a serial killer.

[memracom]

How about: Ask your political representatives for their position on surveillance of citizens and vote accordingly.