Undirected

As much as I suspect that I did the right thing by "cutting the cord," and thus cut myself off from broadcast and cable television news, I do feel that it leaves me out of the loop to a degree. It turns out, however, that nothing cures my feeling of needing to know what's going on in the world than actually looking into what's going on in the world.

Well, that's not actually true, I suppose, because most of the time, reading the news doesn't leave me with the feeling that I have any more insight into what's going on in the world than I did before I started. (This is especially true of "positive news" sites or pages, that tend to concentrate on small-scale human-interest stories.) But this is the thing about reading the news, especially international news; there's very little, if anything, that I can actually take any useful action on. Of course, providing individual citizens with actionable information isn't really the point of most media outlets, especially those that are allowing free access to their reporting.

Not that I know what I'd actually do with information that I could directly use. And maybe that's why reading the news comes across as unsatisfying.