"La lettura del giornale è la preghiera dell'uomo moderno", diceva Hegel. È anche la sua superstizione, aggiungo io. Hegel intendeva dire che il processo di secolarizzazione e immanentizzazione della religione era giunto al punto che per entrare in contatto con la divinità, in qualunque modo la si chiami (Spirito Assoluto, ad esempio) era sufficiente essere aggiornati su quel happens. The Spirit is made manifest not through miracles and works of the saints and prophets, but through the record, or through the unfolding of historical events (not quite the same thing, but some do not distinguish). The problem of a secular religion, however, is that it is still a religion.
Journalism and information (in whatever form, paper, television or electronic) with all the credit they have in order to form a "public opinion", a "social conscience" and the control of political power, are undoubtedly the largest source of non-knowledge we have today, and one of the most dangerous, the illusion of knowledge they produce, and dependence-inducing. Facts and factoids run daily before our eyes, drugged for information, often without them we can realize the extreme insignificance and temporary nature, not only on geological and cosmological scale, but precisely in relation to our lives and our interests even frivolous.
It's more fun to follow a football game in its development, that knowing only the result at the end (or so they say sports fans), but I do not think that the anxiety to know minute by minute, the performance of a stock exchange, or processing of a bill in Parliament, or consultations for the formation or the break-up of political alliances in anticipation of confidence in the Government, have much to do with the sporting spirit. The truth, we should recognize is that most of the information we receive from the newspapers is absolutely unnecessary and that we would live much better without.
Much of the information we receive from an online journal, updated in real time, may be given in block only once a day, so we can feel more relaxed (the prayer mentioned by Hegel was that morning, our modern idolatry urges us to pray compulsively at any time of day). Much of the information contained in a newspaper may be given by a weekly newspaper, and the function of a weekly could largely be done on a monthly basis. Some of informazioni contenute in tutti questi giornali potrebbero non essere date mai, naturalmente, perché mai serviranno a qualcuno (se non forse al giornale stesso per giustificare la sua esistenza).
Quando i giornalisti scioperano si comportano un po' come se dovesse crollare il mondo, come se la democrazia fosse destinata a cedere per un solo giorno di black out informativo, ma in fondo, a ben vedere, non è proprio come se scioperassero gli ospedali, e non se ne sente troppo la mancanza. Possiamo fare a meno della dichiarazione del politico di turno che sarà superata dalla dichiarazione di domani, di leggere quello che oggi ci sembra importante ma domani non lo sarà più (per una collezioni di altri giudizi sferzanti journalism, read Karl Kraus's aphorisms, or Taleb's books).
If the newspapers are the realm of the ephemeral and the transitory, the opposite of journalism is the study of what is eternal, that which stands beyond our earthly misery. The study of being as opposed to mere existence. Those who held a job as far as possible from that of the journalists are, therefore, mathematicians, scholars of the a priori forms of space and time, before all time and space to lived experience. What's less transient Pythagorean theorem? less ephemeral of "news" that there are infinitely many primes, or that there is no triplet of numbers x eyez such that x ^ n + y ^ n = z ^ n (for each n> 2)?
If these are the thesis and antithesis, synthesis Hegel has perhaps found an American mathematician and writer, John Allen Paulos, author of A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper , which describes precisely the paradoxical approach a mathematician to reading newspapers. This is basically nothing more than a work of popularization, which seeks to combat the widespread scientific illiteracy as a bit 'everywhere (and of course that goes beyond the knowledge of only mathematics), teaching at a critical and attentive to deep structures and essential that hide behind a story, the rationale that underlies the real. We therefore think a pars destruens , where you make fun of how some news and dates are similar, and a pars construens where you propose better alternatives (perhaps a little 'utopian).
Examples our own: if I read it, as has happened recently that "without a license and a Moroccan drug addict has hit and killed seven cyclists", I naturally wonder what on earth can add to the tragic news, the fact that the driver was Moroccan ( it does not say if it was left-handed or ambidextrous, or which team tifava, because these data are rightly considered to be insignificant.) So there is a problem now, filter the information to be reported the selected data. If we do not pay attention to these things we risk not so much enter into communication with the zeitgeist , "the spirit of time" but only with an editor's mood a bit 'fascist, we are not really informed about what is going on.
Every time you date a story like that, also would be nice to see a table that contains statistics on the incidence of road deaths to date, perhaps in relation to other phenomena. In this way the reader would perhaps be less inclined to attribute real significance to the events, proportional to their exposure in the newspapers. For example: "Sharm, a shark kills tourist" (on Republic yesterday). The fact that every time a shark killed someone ends up on the news paper, while not all deaths to fall off the bicycle have such prominence, the sharks might make it seem much more dangerous than bicycles, when of course it is not, and likely to be attacked by a shark, even diving in coral reefs, are lowly compared to conduct a two-wheeled vehicle. As, moreover, is unlikely to become a victim of a terrorist attack (many people at this point they look very smart with words and then you say "yes, but if it happens just to you?" As if it meant something).
Some ignorance is responsible for mathematical thought, attributed to the inhabitants of Brembate di Sopra (country where a girl who died recently) that "this has always been a peaceful country, was never anything like this happened." Well, with 7,746 inhabitants, does not surprise me. If the bloody facts of the news take place more frequently in large cities and populous towns in that tiny, there is a strictly mathematical reason that has nothing to do with the fact that the city would be more dangerous. In general, things tend to happen more often "elsewhere" (city or town that is), not in your little corner of the world. The thought that "this is a quiet place," reveals a rather 'limited and egocentric.
Very strange, from our point of view, the habit of journalists to go to "test" the mood of a population by collecting a couple of opinions from passersby. The polls are real things quite complicated: in this case the amount of information that is conveyed by such passages is not only scarce, but perhaps it is even a negative amount. It is not only unnecessary, it is misleading and potentially harmful, leads one to believe that you have knowledge that does not really have. Yet the fake polls are increasingly a key ingredient of online journals. It is true that there is usually a warning "this poll has no scientific value", but because there is this awareness into the habit is even more mysterious. It would be like to publish a story and then write in a note that in all likelihood it is an invention of the editor.
Speaking of polls, it would not hurt if journalists as well as the percentage from time to time gave the margin of error. Today I heard the director of the La 7 TV news commenting on the usual weekly poll on voting intentions of the Italians, which show that the Democratic Party has gained since last week, 0.2 percentage points. The problem is that if you are not given the margin of error, which are presumably above 0.2 per cent more or less, one might even mistake it for a good news for the Democratic Party, rather than a statistically insignificant difference (as indeed one might expect, in the space of one week in which things have not happened sensational). In reality, the consent of the PD may well be dropped.
Those involved in weather forecasting, however, should explain to the listeners that there is nothing strange if the temperatures are above or below the seasonal average: what is the meaning of "media", c ' is an average when there are deviations from the average, temperatures are not always constant. It should also deflate expressions such as "hot record" or "cold record" that have clearly lost all meaning. Maybe we will have some ecologist less but may be worth it, if we are still citizens more aware of the meaning of expressions such as sealed "media" and "record". After
need little and a little 'courage. It may be that the newspapers made correctly, who can find the right balance between the "daily show" and the eternity of the numbers, sell more. Perhaps it is worth trying.
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