“This new weatherman isn’t very good is he?” My Grammy and I sat, crosswords on our lap from the last two days’ papers. I needed an eleven-letter word for prehistoric.
The weatherman cracked his third joke of the night and it fell flat like all the others. “Stick to the forecast buddy,” I said and my pappy laughed from the rocking chair in the corner.
The TV switched to two commentators discussing the growing unhoused population in my grandparents’ rural Pennsylvania town.
Stone age? No that’s two words – and only eight letters.
The TV switched again, and a man with a freshly pressed suit and cropped hair gave an update on Palestinian hostages in Israel – all the way from his wheely chair 6,000 miles away from the events he was describing. My Grammy sighed. Pappy’s eyes looked sad. The news program ended.
Paleolithic. I penciled it in and crossed out the line for 23 across.
My grandparents don’t like 24-7 news outlets. They like that the news starts and then it ends. They can come back to hear more tomorrow at the same time. This made me oddly nostalgic, even though I don’t remember a time before 24-hour news stations. I even started to miss old fashioned paper journalism with my practically blank crossword in my lap (I was not very good at this).
There was something to the silence that came after the program ended. In my grandparents’ house with no internet or phone signal and limited cable channels – the news was not eternal. It was not a constant level of white noise.
The unspoken cultural expectation is that we know everything happening everywhere all the time. Not only do we have to know about it, we have to care about it. If we care about it we have to have an opinion about it. And what is the point of an opinion if it is not for sharing?
I found myself a bit envious of my grandparents who kept their news intake between the hours of six and seven o’clock. That made me feel guilty, like I somehow didn’t care about the state of the world if I wanted to limit my exposure to the horrors of it. Then I remembered my Pappy’s eyes as he watched the update on Israel and Gaza. That man cared more than anyone I know with their news notifications on.
When we see almost every horrific event happening everywhere in the world in a constant flow of new bad news, it is difficult not to become numb to it. On top of the apathy, we have the consequences of general anxiety and feeling of constant overwhelm.
What psychologists and sociologists refer to as “media overload” is a specific kind of information overload with media we consume through a screen. Studies on media overload try to describe the nature if it’s effects particularly on human wellbeing and processing abilities. On top of the many studies that find we do not process digital media as thoroughly as print media, among peer-reviewed sources the results of constant news intake are overwhelmingly negative.
A 2010 study by Yale University shows that “Working-memory overload is associated with dampened activity in multiple brain regions that regulate negative emotion and negative self-concept,” writes health and science journalist Markham Heid in his Medium article “The Neuroscience of News Overload.” He continues, “In other words, the brain’s ability to keep negative thoughts and self-appraisals in check may diminish when its working memory is overtaxed.
Beyond the effect on our cognitive health and wellbeing, there is a pragmatic issue with the constancy of news.
Howard Rosenberg of The Los Angeles Times lingers with this issue in his book “No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and The 24-Hour News Cycle.” He writes that the speed and constancy at which news is received makes it impossible to adequately think about what we see and hear Rosenberg’s book was published in 2008 before the constant sharing of photo and video content on the internet from everyday citizen’s smart phones. These photos and videos give visuals to the horrors that we’re told about in our news sources, and they show up between family photos and 5-Minute Craft videos on social media. If this was a problem in 2008, it is safe to say it has got nothing but worse in the past 16 years.
What Roseburg shows us is that without critical thinking we can’t process the things we hear and see. Not only does this have a negative effect on our wellbeing, but we aren’t able to do anything productive with the information.
“Usefulness of information and human ability to process it declines after an optimal volume of available information is exceeded,” writes Iryna Pentina, PhD and author of “Computers in Human Behavior.” The issue is not the information itself, but the rate at which we consume it.
Reading or watching the news is not inherently negative (notice the medium of this article). The issue is the “more is better” mentality of information. To be a well-rounded person we have to be educated, and education means having as much information surrounding current events as we can – no critical thinking required.
The world has felt like it is ending countless times throughout history. The issue now is we can always see images and videos or hear and read stories about all the ways that it is falling apart. The solution might not be to never read or watch the news again (in fact I’d highly advise against that). Instead, the solution could be taking time to reflect alongside the time we a lot to consuming media. Additionally, there is benefit to focusing more on the news in our own backyard, the areas where we could have an influence. By filtering what we see and hear, maybe we’ll be able to start to understand instead of being deafened by the white noise.
News Overload: when the world becomes white noise
“This new weatherman isn’t very good is he?” My Grammy and I sat, crosswords on our lap from the last two days’ papers. I needed an eleven-letter word for prehistoric.
The weatherman cracked his third joke of the night and it fell flat like all the others. “Stick to the forecast buddy,” I said and my pappy laughed from the rocking chair in the corner.
The TV switched to two commentators discussing the growing unhoused population in my grandparents’ rural Pennsylvania town.
Stone age? No that’s two words – and only eight letters.
The TV switched again, and a man with a freshly pressed suit and cropped hair gave an update on Palestinian hostages in Israel – all the way from his wheely chair 6,000 miles away from the events he was describing. My Grammy sighed. Pappy’s eyes looked sad. The news program ended.
Paleolithic. I penciled it in and crossed out the line for 23 across.
My grandparents don’t like 24-7 news outlets. They like that the news starts and then it ends. They can come back to hear more tomorrow at the same time. This made me oddly nostalgic, even though I don’t remember a time before 24-hour news stations. I even started to miss old fashioned paper journalism with my practically blank crossword in my lap (I was not very good at this).
There was something to the silence that came after the program ended. In my grandparents’ house with no internet or phone signal and limited cable channels – the news was not eternal. It was not a constant level of white noise.
The unspoken cultural expectation is that we know everything happening everywhere all the time. Not only do we have to know about it, we have to care about it. If we care about it we have to have an opinion about it. And what is the point of an opinion if it is not for sharing?
I found myself a bit envious of my grandparents who kept their news intake between the hours of six and seven o’clock. That made me feel guilty, like I somehow didn’t care about the state of the world if I wanted to limit my exposure to the horrors of it. Then I remembered my Pappy’s eyes as he watched the update on Israel and Gaza. That man cared more than anyone I know with their news notifications on.
When we see almost every horrific event happening everywhere in the world in a constant flow of new bad news, it is difficult not to become numb to it. On top of the apathy, we have the consequences of general anxiety and feeling of constant overwhelm.
What psychologists and sociologists refer to as “media overload” is a specific kind of information overload with media we consume through a screen. Studies on media overload try to describe the nature if it’s effects particularly on human wellbeing and processing abilities. On top of the many studies that find we do not process digital media as thoroughly as print media, among peer-reviewed sources the results of constant news intake are overwhelmingly negative.
A 2010 study by Yale University shows that “Working-memory overload is associated with dampened activity in multiple brain regions that regulate negative emotion and negative self-concept,” writes health and science journalist Markham Heid in his Medium article “The Neuroscience of News Overload.” He continues, “In other words, the brain’s ability to keep negative thoughts and self-appraisals in check may diminish when its working memory is overtaxed.
Beyond the effect on our cognitive health and wellbeing, there is a pragmatic issue with the constancy of news.
Howard Rosenberg of The Los Angeles Times lingers with this issue in his book “No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and The 24-Hour News Cycle.” He writes that the speed and constancy at which news is received makes it impossible to adequately think about what we see and hear Rosenberg’s book was published in 2008 before the constant sharing of photo and video content on the internet from everyday citizen’s smart phones. These photos and videos give visuals to the horrors that we’re told about in our news sources, and they show up between family photos and 5-Minute Craft videos on social media. If this was a problem in 2008, it is safe to say it has got nothing but worse in the past 16 years.
What Roseburg shows us is that without critical thinking we can’t process the things we hear and see. Not only does this have a negative effect on our wellbeing, but we aren’t able to do anything productive with the information.
“Usefulness of information and human ability to process it declines after an optimal volume of available information is exceeded,” writes Iryna Pentina, PhD and author of “Computers in Human Behavior.” The issue is not the information itself, but the rate at which we consume it.
Reading or watching the news is not inherently negative (notice the medium of this article). The issue is the “more is better” mentality of information. To be a well-rounded person we have to be educated, and education means having as much information surrounding current events as we can – no critical thinking required.
The world has felt like it is ending countless times throughout history. The issue now is we can always see images and videos or hear and read stories about all the ways that it is falling apart. The solution might not be to never read or watch the news again (in fact I’d highly advise against that). Instead, the solution could be taking time to reflect alongside the time we a lot to consuming media. Additionally, there is benefit to focusing more on the news in our own backyard, the areas where we could have an influence. By filtering what we see and hear, maybe we’ll be able to start to understand instead of being deafened by the white noise.