Episode 10. Detoxing from digital news.

My Analog Life. Season 2, Episode 1: Detoxing from digital news and buying a newspaper

Do you ever find yourself compulsively checking online news? Receiving articles from colleagues which you only read the headline, or feeling guilty about commenting about stories of which you actually don’t know much about?

Perhaps, like myself, we need to re-evaluate our relationship with news. My personal journey with the news is pretty straight-forward. In my early 20s, I always had the BBC and The Guardian on speed-dial on my phone. I’d regularly check the news and follow stories closely. Myself and friends shared articles we agreed with into our respective echo chambers for it to have a…..

…well no impact really, let’s be honest.

…

After I quit social media, then unquit social media but dialed it very much back and put it in a tightly constrained box with various blocking tools, I found my brain searching for cheap hits of dopamine and information. That was readily available at my finger tips in the form of digital news. But after a while I realised I was just reading online news to ‘rage-bait’ myself on the daily. I told myself I was staying ‘informed’ – but what did this really mean? I didn’t know anything more than anyone else on major topics, heck I couldn’t even remember the articles I had read the day before.

After banning the news from my phone and my laptops (personal + work) I settled on allowing myself the Financial Times each day so I’d at least stay up to speed in the professional environment. I told myself it was more refined than my days-past of The Guardian and the BBC (reader I inform you, it is not). Now the Financial Times, much like the others aforementioned, has some incredible journalism.

But. 

That’s not the problem. For their well informed articles is not what I was using them for. I’d log in, find the alluring headline that stirred me emotionally, and send it to a colleague… sound similar?

This blog isn’t an attack on journalism. Its an attack on how the ‘digital machine’ has forced even the most trust-worthy publications to run click-bait headlines, empty news articles and narrow opinions. It’s likewise a critique of this weird behaviour we have been moulded into, where news is no longer something to be considered, but rather entertainment that plays on your emotions at every possible break during the day. All of the above publications write educational and interesting stories. We should read these in the right dosage, at the right time, for the right reasons. But its the slop that drives the engagement unfortunately.

So how to separate the wheat from the chaff then?

Don’t bother!

For just a few quid a week you can have a professional editor do the job for you!

It was quite the epiphany when I realised I could just buy a newspaper and spend time with stories that I want to be more informed on. Intentionally, at specific times of the week, digest them and then walk away from them.

I find the articles tend to be longer. For a ‘weekly’ newspaper, its feels like they put in less ‘live’ reaction and more of their analysis pieces going into the details of how and why, versus just the ‘what’. You have an editors choice helping you pick out the best and most relevant pieces. More importantly I find it is a completely different behaviour engaging with a newspaper vs reading digital news. Its more intentional. Its something you can more easily put down or avoid. It’s less of a compulsive habit of signing on to try feel an emotion. Some weeks I’ll admit I’ve put the thing in the bin without reading it. And that’s okay.

Its okay to not know the main talking points of the major outlets on any given story. I think we’d be much better off as a society if people could admit their ignorance. We could normalise the phrase,

“I don’t know, I’m not informed on this topic” followed by a “I’ll need to get back to you on that” or even a “and I’m not going to for I don’t care” would feel more genuine than this weird soup of regurgitating the same 400 bytes of information around people we agree with.

Of course there will still be a need for live reporting of breaking news, which we all will want to follow closely, understandably. The issue is that these events don’t happen every-day, but digital news needs to sell us on the idea that they do.

We can do better!

Comments are always welcome. This is an evolving space for me – I want to be informed and understand the world, but also live a life without daily anxiety and dread. 

Over and out,

Callum

p.s. The photo today is a spread of the recent copies of Courrier International, a French weekly newspaper that collates the top news-stories from around the world and presents them. As you can see they offer a paper format, one I am a dear fan of. I particularly like how you get a mix of angles, political leanings and geographies. I’ve heard Ground News offer something similar for digital. I’m not sure what’s available in print in English, perhaps Private Eye, although its not quite the same being a satire magazine rather than an aggregator.