I think I needed this piece after yesterday.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/ ... lf-dobelli
A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What's relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. That's the underlying risk that has been lurking, and could lurk in other bridges.
How many times have we seen that Q'anon barbarian today? I get that faces need to be identified, but he's the car here. I'm seeing much less about the bridge. We are so obsessed with MAGA, I don't even think we could point to what the bridge actually is.
News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. The daily repetition of news about things we can't act upon makes us passive. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitised, sarcastic and fatalistic. The scientific term is "learned helplessness". It's a bit of a stretch, but I would not be surprised if news consumption, at least partially contributes to the widespread disease of depression.
...
News works like a drug. As stories develop, we want to know how they continue. With hundreds of arbitrary storylines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore.
There I was yesterday afternoon, getting my personal house in order, when my phone buzzes. I see a chilling, almost
unreal headline about the storming of the Capitol, and choose to spend the rest of the day and beyond focusing on that and nothing but that.
things we already know limit our creativity. This is one reason that mathematicians, novelists, composers and entrepreneurs often produce their most creative works at a young age. Their brains enjoy a wide, uninhabited space that emboldens them to come up with and pursue novel ideas.
I definitely get the most enrichment out of podcasts, not news. Mostly long-form interviews with thinkers and creatives. I have been doing more of that lately, but man do I miss my 20s when I could get out a pen or a guitar and just offer up my own wild and passionate ideas into the ether just to see what stuck around.
Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don't have to arrive in the form of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too.
Important to note that this piece seems to be defining "news" more in the vein of headlines, clickbait, doomscrolling twitter, and mindless consumption. I don't read it as a hit piece against journalism or media at large, and I 100% respect the work of those of you doing it honestly in the media. Particularly the backbone producer, copy editor, etc types. Still, it's good to turn the notifications off here and there, maybe doubly so in times of up-to-the-minute crisis unless you're right there in it.
