A short tale of traditional media, social media, the human brain, capitalism and why I still sometimes look at Instagram.
A friend recently sent a short extract from a podcast on a group chat and asked my opinion about it.
As I was dealing with a leaky oil seal I didn’t check my phone for a bit and came back to hundreds of messages,
once I caught up with them I disliked the idea of answering to the important bits in short messages so here we are.
The podcast host argued that humans (specifically their souls) are not made to constantly hear about what’s going on in the world and should rather
live in small communities of about 150 people and reduce their news intake (apparently this also cures anxiety in children).
I am not going to link the podcast as the host’s website is described as “selling pseudoscience”.
I am generally in disagreement with this kind of people but in this specific instance I find myself partially in agreement.
While it would be dumb, irresponsible and almost impossible to completely stop consuming news, there is no denying that we are exposed to way more than we need. Additionally most of the news I see is intentionally polarizing and often biased.
As if this wasn’t enough on it’s own, news that are shocking or bad tend to attract more attention, so it goes without saying that most of the reported news is generally negative.
We can’t possibly be up to date and fully informed about everything going on in the world.
The time and effort required to do so would be immense and I wouldn’t be surprised if the type of news was enough to trigger some kind of anxiety in people.
Am I then suggesting you stop caring about climate change or what genocide your government is directly or indirectly funding?
Absolutely not but as with most things in life, pick your battles!
In a sense – the capitalistic one – news have been turned in just another way to keep people on some kind of platform.
And being glued to a screen, in particular consuming short form content, is one of the most efficient way to generate revenue for shareholders.
To summarize and give a succinct opinion on the video: I don’t think we were made to be in a specific type of community (while I do see value in having a community – just don’t think you have to live in an isolated place to have it!) and I can’t really tell if exposing kids to less news affects their anxiety at all (but I would wager that the host doesn’t actually know either). I do think that consuming news (anything really) mindfully is a must in this day and age, our attention is limited and quite important, we should spend it where we care about.
On that last bit, our attention has been turned into a resource. It is quite clear that short form content is a very useful tool to keep people onto a platform. This has been quite literally weaponized against us, and it is the main reason why I actually got rid of social media.
It messes up your ability to focus, to be productive and in the worse cases the ability to do stuff in general.
All for the sake of serving you ads.
In the end there is some beauty in social media, just not on platform owned by mega corporations, which is why I sometimes still look at Instagram.
Did the attention bit resonated with you and want to try to claw back some of it back? Consider watching this video by Elena Bateman
Want to hear similar things but from someone else that’s better than me? Try this other video by Internet Shaquille
