About half a year back, I decided to give up on my old news clicker due to it repeatedly trying to advertise automobiles to me.
Ads are an unfortunate realism in the modern age, but when every third page of my news channel is an ad telling me about the "New Buick POS-150", I have to give up.
I made the mistake of turning to a phone app which is proving to be just as unreliable, but in a different way. I still get advertised to, but not as heavily or overtly. What this new feed does is cater to irrelevancy.
I decided to start small when I started this new feed, so the only topics I have tagged are "Science", "Sci-Fi", "Space" and "Dinosaurs".
Today alone I had a page for "Shooting Portraits of Strangers on the Street Like a Ninja", two different articles on Windows 10 (both ads), one on the recent killing of Cecil the lion, an interview with Jeffrey Martin (he created an app), an ad for an anime game (I dislike anime), and one article from - of all places - Fox News, about a cache of Dinosaur eggs found in China.
That's a fairly normal set of article for this app, but the final one was the one that really got me. It was regarding how Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, "dresses like she's 50". The author took great exception to the fact that Mrs. Middleton was wearing a "bland and uninteresting" outfit while taking her infant son, George, to his Christening.
What got me most about the article was the petulance of the author and the interviewees and their feelings of presumption and disapproval that this woman would DARE wear something other than a $50k style-conscious dress while out in public. The entitled language used by this article to describe the lack of opulence or modern style in her wardrobe was frankly quite disgusting.
But this highlighted the issue I have with this news app, and with public-facing news in general - it's mostly trash. If it isn't selling you something, it's pointless gossip about people who don't matter, or equally pointless trivia about public figures with way more to them than what they wear or where they vacation.
What business is it of anyone's what Kate Middleton wears when she goes to baptize her son? Why is the "unrevealing" collar of her shirt a literal news item? Are people that desperate to take a look at her cleavage? I guarantee it looks just the same as any other woman's.
Right now, a new paper is days away from being published that could open the door to new understanding on the spectrum of autism. New pictures of Pluto are coming in, giving us the first look at a world millions of miles away. An antibody was just found that could combat MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus). Closer to home, the remains of Jamestown's founders was just discovered. There are even some brain mapping experiments going on to help us better understand how our brains process awareness.
All of that is a lot more interesting that Kate Middleton's dress.