Staying Informed

Originally posted on February 16, 2015, by cruisingrunner

One of the things I missed when we left home was staying in touch with what was going on in the world. But that’s hard to do with limited access to the internet, so I eventually just let it go and learned to be content to wallow in my blissful ignorance. When we did have our brief brushes with electronic connectivity my focus tended to be uploading photos and catching up with what was going on with my friends and family. So, I developed a bad habit of getting what little news I could from scanning headlines of news stories people shared on facebook.

Since we’ve been in New Zealand and I have practically daily internet access, I’ve learned just how bad a habit that really was. I’ve started actually reading some of those “news” stories that people share, and frequently they look and sound like real news, but if you dig a little deeper you see that they have been twisted into an alternate reality to match the extreme social and/or political bias of the source of the “news.”

Because I can, I am now getting my news from a variety of sources, and I read articles instead of scanning headlines. Or if I’m busy or disconnected, I just skip it. I mean, it’s better to be uninformed than misinformed, right?