{"id":5894,"date":"2013-02-22T09:31:31","date_gmt":"2013-02-22T17:31:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marketriders.com\/investing\/?p=5894"},"modified":"2016-12-21T07:30:44","modified_gmt":"2016-12-21T15:30:44","slug":"learning-to-ignore-the-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marketriders.com\/investing\/learning-to-ignore-the-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning to Ignore the News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like a lot of folks, I love to feel well informed. And the Internet has made it possible to be at least moderately well-informed about nearly anything. Put another way, it’s harder than ever to ignore the news.<\/p>\n

Five years ago, would you or I have known about strikes in\u00a0Mali? Ten years ago, we would we be following the day-to-day health updates of a Venezuelan president?<\/p>\n

Somebody would be, mostly like a subscriber to\u00a0The Economist<\/em>\u00a0or some other international affairs publication. But not most of us, by any stretch of the imagination.<\/p>\n

\"ignore<\/a><\/p>\n

On balance, more news and information is a good thing. Knowing the details of other people’s struggles and triumphs can lead to greater sense of empathy. It certainly puts own’s own troubles in perspective.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, we sometimes know too much. “Information overload” is a term that’s been kicking around since at least the 1970s, starting with the Alvin Toffler book\u00a0Future Shock<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In simple terms, info overload means that a person inundated with data has a harder time making decisions. Swinging at a fastball is hard enough; being pelted with them\u00a0makes hitting even one just about impossible<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It took the Internet, though, to really crank up the information pitching machine. We know the morning temperature in\u00a0Miami, the NASCAR finishes, how to make a decent steak on a grill, the market open and close (and every tick between), \u00a0even minor tremors as they happen off the coast of\u00a0Japan. Too much!<\/p>\n

For investors, information overload often comes in the form of headlines.<\/p>\n

That’s because the Internet “news” game is a race for attention, however\u00a0momentary. \u00a0While you might think the supply of sentient readers out there is endless, it pales in comparison to the billions of web pages competing for them.<\/p>\n

So, financial news that used to be an evening TV wrap-up of five or eight blue chips and an index has turned into a flood of data only specialists need to know. Here are five headlines from the web right now, from five different consumer news sites:<\/p>\n