Put This Paper Down!

Or, rather, turn your phone off!

The news system is shot. The way in which we learn about the world and interact with realities outside of our immediate vicinity, no longer serves its purpose. Rather, it has become actively harmful to our lives.

Once, reading the news involved long-form discussion, detailed and intricate analysis, and the presentation of facts, arguments, and counterarguments. Papers would identify key stories, neatly lay them out for us in the morning at the breakfast table, and return to issues as they unfolded. There was a sense of care, and of conclusion. It was a system probably most similar to a documentary film. This is now gone. In its stead, we are faced with a terrifying and overwhelming montage: tweets and sound bites, retweets, graphs with big red arrows heading downwards, and sensationalist clickbait headlines of a calibre once reserved for niche teenage YouTube videos.

None of this is meant to educate us. Rather, it is designed to entangle us further in a disparate and addictive cycle. We don’t really understand the facts we read about anymore. How could we, when we are surrounded by a deluge of pithy two-minute briefs, often blown so out of proportion that they hardly look anything like the original story?

This overconsumption of media runs people thin. Humans are social creatures. We are built to empathise, feel pain, and act with compassion, but this is meant to be limited to those we know personally. Media from around the world (and bear with me while I state the obvious) increases our knowledge of what is going on all around the world. Everywhere. You have the ability to access information about diseases, and famines, and wildfires, and climate disasters, and crime rates, and financial crashes, and terrifying megalomaniacal neo-Nazis, absolutely anywhere.

To an extent this can be good. Broadening our understanding of the world is not in itself detrimental. What is so harmful is that we have lost the ability to control the volume and quality of this information.

We are swamped with the awareness of horrors that have no actual bearing on our lives — people we have never met, will never meet, who we ultimately cannot help. The consequences of this information affect us far more than we realise. Our ability to empathise is pulled so taut, so blotted with the stains of crises that for all intents and purposes do not exist in our reality, that we do not have anything left for the people around us. Because what is another crisis when you can’t count them on your fingers? Why help out those clearly in need around us when there are people far worse off, further away? What is their struggle compared to the enhanced photos and sensationalising headlines? 

I acknowledge that we have a duty to be informed. It is supremely important to interact with the world, understand it, and broaden our horizons. But I would argue that we have a greater duty to those around us, to protect our own energy and avoid the deluge, in order to have something left over for the people we can actually help. I’d also argue that there is a difference between learning about the world around us, and the ability to parrot statistics from faraway lands.

So what’s the middle ground here? It’s not putting this paper down (apologies for my hypocritical clickbait sensationalist headline). But it’s also not carrying on in the same way.

This year, I’ve started picking one or two stories I care about and following them from start to finish. This way I am still learning — arguably learning more. And more importantly, avoiding the horror-movie montage of exploding mushroom clouds and angry-looking suits.

Image from Wikimedia Commons