“News of the world” threaten our intentionality

It happened. Again. Despite my strong will (or at least my intention), I suddenly found myself reading news. Which news? Well, the ones everyone in my bubble talk about, mainly gossip, trash and everything I can define “as valuable as durable”: the kind of information you can sure (and better) live without, all the facts and details that are not so related to our lives and that nobody will care about after a few days. I can definitely say my mind has become much clearer since I live without checking news (lot of years now I don’t check news websites, also I live without a TV nearby since I was 18, basically when I left my parents’ house); this is part of my “digital minimalism” (I’ll write soon about that book by Cal Newport). That we live surrounded by noise is a concept well-known to me, but this is also a good occasion to start digging, to deep dive on what and why it happens – hopefully to better understand and prevent the phenomen, to live accordingly to my “intentional and deliberate information consumption”.

What happens (a qualitative analysis)

It’s easy to see what kind of news we are exposed most of the time, often involving the classical triad: sex, money, blood. And when they are combined (e.g.: sex + blood = raped to death), the effects are not added, but rather multiplied. I’m not here to write about what makes a “good news”, you probably heard of famous aphorisms like: “You never read about a plane that did not crash” or “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news” (click here if you want to start another journey in a rabbithole). What I have been observing since I was a child is that the “resonance” of a news is usually function of entity/quantity, anomaly and distance; that’s why a single small building crashed because of an earthquake is a news with regional or national coverage, ready to be forgotten in a week, but two huge twin towers falling down because of two airplanes hijacked by terrorists (or whatever you believe, it’s not the point here) are still vividly impressed in our memories, even after more than 20 years and even if we live thousands of kilometers away from New York. And we all know the methods media use to exploit our curiosity: from clickbait and promise of revealing morbid details to the latest conspiracy theory that you must read right now before “they” (?) will censor everything. What I noticed, in particular, is that what happens over time it’s something like that:

When a big news start appearing from a single source, it can be something so “important” (according to the combined system of mass media) that all the other news occourring in the same period day will be “oscurated”. That’s why, for example, if a “minor actor” dies the same day of a huge businessman and former prime minister that ruled a country for decades, there will be very little “visibility” on the second news, since all the lights are on the first news. We can even measure the effect based on what people searched on one of the most popular search engine:

As you can see, the actor had only the “bad luck” to die in the same day of a more famous person, since the “spike” could have been higher than the interest on the former prime minister, if only it happened a couple of days before a a few weeks later. By the way, talking again about these metrics, interesting how a fact impacts on coverage about everything involved, for example if we consider one of the most morbid news category, rape:

It’s evident that, removing the “offset”, you can almost overlap the lines, meaning a strong correlation (“stupro” is the italian word for rape).

Of course, as you can imagine, those searches are not casual (it’s extremely unlikely that milions of people start searching the same specific topic in the same moment just by chance), but guided from what appears in the homepage / first page / first minutes (depending on media like webpages, social media, newspaper/magazine, TV/radio), in a vicious cycle: the more you highlight a news, the more people want to know details, usually gossip or some negligible detail, since common news consumers don’t have the ability/will to think in depth (both at high level and at the really useful details), I’ll write it better in the following section.

Please note that all the curves can be different for several reasons, including for example new details discovered, new evidence in a court case or important evolution of a phenomenon, for example a controversial aviation accident happened decades ago, after a recent possible disclosure by a former prime minister:

Some news suddenly “disapper from the radar” (no pun intendend with the previous aviation accident), like in the case of CoViD-19, that all of a sudden ceased to exist worldwide: it turned out that the best vaccine/antidote was Vladimir Putin!

What it’s somehow true in the new marketing, that if you don’t exist on the web you simply don’t exist at all, it’s true for almost every topic as well: after 2 years, people forgot about what seemed to be (at least at thebeginning) the ultimate threat to the world population and started worrying about the conflict that we still see between Russia and EU+NATO (sorry, I was distracted by some news, I mean between Russia and Ukraine).

Why it happens

Why we are so “vulnerable” to all this noise? There are several reasons that explain it, all of them with strong evolutionistic basis. There’s the FOMO (evolutionisitcally bonded to loneliness aversion) and the mechanism that push us to look at what killed someone: the same happens in highway when people stop to look (once useful to see which animals or mushroom or other people killed our friends in the village, hence survived those who had the genes correlate to the behavior of stay alert and watch out). Same is the spreading of buttons like “be the first to comment and share”, to be acknowledged in your circle as the one “always on the ball” and moreover to virtue signalling – and yes, you must have a position about everything, in a fraction of second you must write that you are with or against a person or a Country, it doens’t matter that the you were the last one in your classroom in every subject and that you can’t even identify Russia and Ucraina on a map, like some US citizens that think that Iran is in UK, in their homeland or even somewhere in the ocean:

Needless to say, you must have a specific opinion, people around you are expecting you to jump on the bandwagon (with the mainstream flow or the opposite one, depeding on the point of view of your social circle: going with the politically correct flow or questioning the status quo); at the same time you’ll feel like you are part of the Zeitgeist. Reading and sharing the news, you’ll feel part of a mechanism going somewhere, so you’ll experience maybe a “sense of importance”: after all, you’re talking about the same thing the world (or your local circle) talk about! You’ll be one of the many “qualified” expert opinionists, switching from psychologist, to strategist, to engineer and virologist, depending on the topic you’re talking about. People who never saw Boolean algebra but that must express their “valuable” opinions on artificial intelligence and Quantum computing: they’re not part of the progress, they’re only contributing to add noise.

This noise produces indeed an effect: the more the mass will speak about a certain news, the more the media will speak about it, a snowball effect that distorts reality: the tones and the volume/frequency of a news will modify the perception of the reality. The availability heuristic will make us thinking, for example, that we are living in a horrible world, in one of the less safe country in the world and that the crime rate is increasing exponentially: we don’t have time/will to check data and understanding context, we just now that today and yesterday all the first pages were full of homicides, when numbers and graphs may clearly shows that we are living in a country with one of the lowest homicide rate and that people murdered are fewer every year. This will influence also elections, leading to more or less votes to certain politic parties, depending on their agenda. When pushed by fear and will to protect the status quo, usually it leads to conservative and/or right parties; when pushed by noisy minorities with their ideologies, it leads to the progressist/left wing. No surprise that several politicians and dictators spend lot of effort in an attempt to control information, in some cases with psychological operations (PsyOps), including propaganda.
For the same reason, weapons of mass distraction shift the focus on evergreen background topic – that we are in a global crysis and it will be worse every day – so we talk about recession, inflation and we constantly fear poverty, even if we are in the best period ever.
Although this leads to the nonsense: most people agree on this need to “fix the economy” (in absolute quantitative terms and in terms of repartitioning), but at the same time time time, time, energy and money are wasted on discussing super-specific issues that affect a small noisy part of the population or complicated discussions about organic livestock, animal welfare and environmental protection. Before you misunderstand me: those are (almost) all very important issues, but without first figuring out how to access more resources and use them better, it’s hard to think about improving our environment (the poorest nations are also the ones that pollute the most and have the least respect for the rights of people and animals). Understanding this, however, requires deep work, certainly not jumping from one TV show to another. Studying is boring and requires sacrifice, better to stop and read only headlines or scroll through biased photos on social media!
That’s why in some countries you read the news about a young guy hitting a pedestrian and right after a few minutes you’ll see some politician expressing concerns and shouting that the day after they will approve a new law on that specific topic: ready-made populism, served faster than a hamburger from MacDonald’s. No serious strategic plans, but only extremely reactive politics. Reactive to the media and to the gut of the population, with urgency to show and act fast, since feedback on consensus are now immediate, in real time!
When I was 15 y.o., I studied feedback systems, at the point of making exercise on complex systems and quicly understood that a feedback that is too fast and with small tolerance can be extremely dangerous, leading to excessive (and absolutely no efficient) resource consumption, not to mention the instability! It’s like an unexperienced driver on the snow, steering the wrong way, with the wrong response speed, at the wrong time. Governed by dangerous divergent series. That’s the risk of having politicians with no scientific background (and no deep understanding of sociology as well). But I’ll stop here since I went too far from the main topic.

And so, with these premises, some “journalists” write news that lots of common people read, comment and share. We are talking of people that vote for a referendum on nuclear energy when they don’t even know the difference between a bomb and a pot of hot water: sure they don’t know anything, they don’t have time to read facts from scientific institutions (nobody here is pretending they must get a degree in each topic they read, but at least understanding the basics). They’re too busy to follow the latest distortions of reality and history by some woke series where Cleopatra is supposed to be black or they want to spend their time scrolling trash content on social media for more than 2,5 hours per day! Often, social media pages are also the “primary source of information” for a lot of people (not so much worse compared to the traditional newspapers, if you can see their decline, with only few exceptions). I can understand (but not approve) their point of view, they need engagement through polarization and indignation, since hate and strong feelings are the best way to make bored and tired people stay on a content and perform some lazy actions on it, while thousands of popups with ads blink in their eyes.

How we can mitigate this threat

OK, understood the phenomen and why it happens, but is there a way to prevent or at least reduce it? I could suggest to eliminate every social media account and stop reading junk in a passive way, since it’s an asimmetric warfare and they have much more time, highly-paid people and knowledge to defeat your will, you’re alone and maybe often too tired to fight, indulging in this bad habit. We simply can’t compete with monsters such as information overload and other enemies I wrote in first part of Searching like an Intelligence Analyst – Part 1. Are we hopeless? No.

The key is, as often repeated, intentionality. The solution starts with being aware that we tend, by default, to “amuse ourselves to death” (stop telling yourself that your feed is 100% important news, it’s mostly trash, in the best case is superficial information scratching the surface and full of biases) and operate a paradigm shift, from this:

To deliberate search and practice. You have a doubt or a curiosity when thinking or when reading something “deep”? Well, go and search for news, but in a fixed time window, use a timer if needed.

Blaise Pascal wrote “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for miseries and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries“. And news consumption is one of the many modern ways to escape from ourselves (“modern” since in the past it was different: you had to wait at least the day after for an update or more news on your local newspaper, no access to thousands of opinionists and no updates 24/7). Consider it poison like alcool, drug, too much sugar and so on. Yes, you can survive to small doses, but the risk to become dependent is high. All of a sudden, you find yourself eating a huge low-quality chocolate bar and then it’s really hard to eat the needed high-quality food after. Do you really want to poison your mind and lose time and energy to read something stupid and not relevant to you? I know, you may argue that we are living in a hyperconnected world, that if a butterfly move the wings somewhere… but stop for a moment and wait. The butterfly effect is often unpredictable and yes, better we know the what politicians say (in this case, I suggest just reading the law, much more effective and “sure”) and what happens in the world, but breathe and think: the news I’m reading/listening is falling in my circle of control or at least of influence?

Knowing all the details about the last heartquake happened thousands of kilometer from me it’s something that is “useful” to me? If I know that some people somewhere died in a terroristic attack, will I be able to help the dead ones? Or will I be only much more worried and stressed – even if you think you’re “cold”, what you see/listen will remain at a certain level in your mind, so if you listen everyday that we are living in the worst economic period ever, your brain will process the information and several times during the day and the night will remind you that you’re poor, even if the crisis didn’t touch you at all.

Keep reminding yourself that what we know, specially if just happened, it’s just a temporary information, sometimes distorted and maybe the truth will emerge decades after (I know what I am talking about, there are some information “classified” for security purpose and that will remain secret/hidden from the eyes of the population for really long time). Not to mention all the information with a certain degree of complexity that it’s practically useless if you don’t know the systems related to the fact reported in the news. And usually you will spend a lot of time to construct in your mind what happened, adjusting the timeline every time you listen to an update. Unless you really need to know all the latest details (for example, you are a military commander in operations near the country border and need to predict next enemy moves or you’re responsible for a company to know if some resources in another country won’t be available anymore), stop syncing your feed. Otherwise, you’ll keep your brain busy with dozens of Viterbi algorhitm implementaion in a costant attempt to predict the “truth with maximum likelihood” given the distorted pieces of information you received. And without knowing the possible code, since rarely we can have the big picture and a deep understanding in what we read in the news. Everyone spoke, for 2 years, about CoViD-19 pandemic, but if people stopped refreshing the numbers and stopped listening dozens of virologists (the rockstars of the period) and started reading good books on biology instead, maybe we would have suffered less and learned something.
Do you want to trade energy and your finite amount of time with garbage that will also probably grow in quantity the day after? Maybe much better relaxing and reading a good book. News platforms and social networks implemented infinite-scrolling pages and autoplay videos, in a (successful) attempt to keep us trapped on their spaces, we must often repeat ourselves that we are under attack by this technology and that they fight even our biological needs (“We’re competing with sleep, on the margin. And so, it’s a very large pool of time.” – Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO).

Do a favour yourself: stop craving for news, choose piece of mind and intentional living.