These days, looking at any one of my many devices, it feels like some kind of weird cosmic restaurant waiter asking me, “Hello, sir, how would you like to have your death today? We have a few specials at the moment: disease, fire, police, gun-toting teen, hurricane, or whatever’s behind door number six!”
Sometimes you just need a break from all that. I recently took a couple of days off the news and social media, and believe me, you won’t miss much. And even if you do, you can catch up pretty quickly. During the recent back-to-back weeks of political conventions, I realized that, quite bluntly, you don’t have to watch. I barely watched the DNC and only saw a few highlights from the RNC. All that rhetoric? We’re not built for it. Especially, when it’s available 24/7 on our pocket computers.
We all need breaks. It’s important to recognize how our news and media consumption affects how we feel.
I mean, it’s just not healthy to watch a snuff film every morning. It’s traumatic. Here’s an interesting article on the topic, including alternatives to sharing videos and advice for what to do when you accidentally see a traumatic video.
Please, don’t misunderstand me: I believe videos of heinous acts of murder committed by authority figures should be published and made publicly available. And all those involved in the crime should be brought speedily to trial. But that doesn’t mean the videos are not traumatic to watch.
There’s a balance that we need to maintain between being informed and feeling dissociated.
I hit my wall a few years ago, actually. It was 2016 and ISIS was rampaging across Syria and Iraq, deadly acts of domestic terrorism by lone gunmen occurred seemingly daily in the US, and we were in the thick thorny thicket of the 2016 Presidential campaigns.
Since then, mindfulness has increased in popularity and more and more people are speaking about the many, many harmful effects of social media. At the time, I felt like I was losing my connection to the present moment.
So one day I just turned off all push notifications and news alerts.
It’s difficult to properly paraphrase this kind of thing — mental health, unwarranted news alerts, emotional invasion — but last year’s “headspace” meme does a pretty good job of asking the kind of important questions we, unfortunately, need to ask ourselves when choosing to read the news and engage with media today: “Are you in the right headspace to receive information that could possibly hurt you?”
Back in 2016, I took a stab at coming up with some solutions or options for maintaining balance and control while wanting to stay informed in our 24/7 news cycle and wrote the essay “A Plea For ‘Soft’ Push Notifications in Our Sad, Scary 24/7 News Cycle.” TL;DR: News alerts and push notifications should first ask you if you’re in the right headspace before belting you in the face with sad, scary news.
Why can’t technology (and the delivery of the news) be more empathetic? We continue to expect our technology to act “human” — I’m looking at you: Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots, Zuckerberg — but then we don’t hold it accountable to the same standards that we expect from other humans.
It seems that the root of this weird relationship is the capitalization of attention. Everyone is fighting mercilessly for your attention: the social networks, the news organizations, streaming channels, the politicians. They all want your time because that’s how they make money: through ads, through subscriptions, through data. These systems are built to keep your attention and ruthlessly steal your time.
“You get a show or a movie you’re really dying to watch, and you end up staying up late at night, so we actually compete with sleep. And we’re winning!”
— Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, speaking at a conference in 2017
The people who build and maintain these platforms do not have your best interests in mind. These systems and processes are all intentional. And once they put a pocket computer in the hands of 3.5 billion people, well, now they really have your attention, don’t they?
Yes, there are some individuals and organizations who are working hard to make a change. Check out Tristin Harris and The Center for Humane Technology. And I’m very interested to see what Eli Pariser builds with Civic Signals. These folks are fighting the good fight.
But from where I’m sitting, I don’t quite see a winning strategy here. As long as these companies and tech platforms can make money from your time and attention, they will have absolutely no interest in doing otherwise.
So what can we do? We can take action to reclaim some of our time and attention. We can turn off push notifications, remove apps from our phones, and bring more intention and choice to how we use these platforms and how we consume news and media. Nir Eyal has some interesting things to say about intention, even wrote a book about it: how terribly distracted we all are all the time, how intention is the opposite of distraction, and how he and others built these platforms precisely to manipulate and maintain your attention.
Last year, Nielsen reported that 45% of Americans “very often” or “always” use a second screen while watching TV. I imagine that’s pretty much the antithesis of being present and mindful. And I’ve done it a lot. But we now have a “one screen only” rule at our house. Sure, there are times when you may want to completely zone out to some silly reality show while also scrolling Instagram, I get it. But when choosing to double your screens, I’d be willing to bet that neither screen is really benefiting you.
It feels like a weird, shameful secret to share, but it’s true: you don’t have to be up-to-date on the news every hour of every day. Or even every day of every week. It will all still be there later. And later, when you’re in the right headspace to receive information that could possibly hurt you, then yes, if you’d like, go ahead and dive in headfirst. Just do it on your schedule and do it mindfully, with intention.
Or not. You don’t have to watch.