That signal to noise quote is actually great, and one of the reasons why the late Aaron Schwartz refused to read the news. He said in one of his essays it's far more valuable to read books, and basically explained in more words, the signal to noise problem.
zerostar07|7 years ago
majewsky|7 years ago
A lot of what is said will be redundant because each report needs to repeat the basics to be able to stand on its own. For a returning viewer, that's not new information, ergo noise.
The journalists and experts may spend time speculating about what happens next. This information will be outdated the next day as new developments take place, so it's noise for me unless the speculation provides value for me between the broadcast and the next day.
I stopped watching TV news on a regular basis, and switched to reading a weekly newspaper for precisely this reason. With a few days of distance from the original event, everyone can catch their breath and take a step back to put the story into the bigger picture.
Now after 6 years, I've cancelled my newspaper subscription in order to read more books, so I'm deliberately zooming out even more.
quadrangle|7 years ago
The point was expressed badly, but it's about the way that the average quality of new-stuff is a lot lower than the average quality of a curated set of high-quality stuff from a time period.
It's like how you'll see better movies picking out the best movies from all of movie history versus picking even the best of whatever happens to be the newest.