How I cope with information (and disinformation) overload
Confession: I love the news. I love news feeds. I love analyzing events as they’re happening and being the first to lean over to my coworkers at nearby desks (or these days, post a message in Slack) to tell them about the latest breaking story.
I’ve never felt more overwhelmed.
We no longer live in an information economy, but an attention economy. If you have the top dozen news apps on your phone, you‘ll probably receive close to 100 notifications per day about stories ranging from car crashes to Donald Trump’s latest tweet — and then another notification from Twitter about that same tweet as well.
I can’t keep up with that deluge of information. You can’t either. Nobody can. So we make choices about what we pay attention to in real time, which inadvertently creates a feedback loop incentivizing news organizations to publish the most provocative headlines they can, as fast as they can.
Social media, especially Facebook, incentivize even worse behavior. Meme pages thrive on virality, which means at best posting inflammatory zingers stripped of nuance, and at worst sharing deliberately provocative falsehoods.
We’re creating a world where we don’t know what we can believe or who we can trust, and the information that we do believe just gives us anxiety about the state of the human condition.
I recently decided it was time to re-evaluate my relationship with the news and how I kept myself informed about what’s going on with the world. Here’s what I did:
1. Cut out all sources of breaking news and notifications.
No CNN app, no news channels, no push notifications. This one felt counterintuitive to me at first, because what if something important happened and I missed it? Isn’t it my duty to stay informed about what’s going on in the world?
And then I realized that CNN has never caused me to drop everything and immediately change what I was doing. Not once. Sure, what’s happening in Washington DC is often important, but it’s rarely urgent.
That little adrenaline rush of learning bad news — another mass shooting, protests in France, you name it — adds to my sense of anxiety about the world, without adding to my understanding of it.
To be clear, I’m absolutely not saying that we should blinker ourselves to what’s going on in the world. But do I need to know about it right now, in this exact second? Almost certainly not.
2. Prefer print and long-form journalism to audiovisual and short-form formats.
Very few issues can be meaningfully understood through an infographic, caption on a meme, 30-second news segment, and so forth. I’ve developed a routine of saving articles from my various digest subscriptions (Medium and Longreads) as well as curated articles shared on Twitter by journalists and trusted subject matter experts to Pocket.
Once a day, I take 30–60 minutes to read articles and essays in Pocket. Giving myself a dedicated time-bound segment of my day to catch up on the state of the world — while still maintaining some objectivity and distance from it — allows more of an opportunity to analyze the stories, make notes about what topics I should learn more about, and so forth. Context is always key, and I just can’t get it by skimming headlines.
3. Stop engaging on Facebook.
I used to post fairly frequently on political topics, and would jump into conversations any time one appeared in my feed. I just can’t bring myself to do it anymore, even if I see a meme posted by one of my more politically-aligned friends and do a mental “oh snap, you tell them!”
I say Facebook specifically because I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s the most toxic place for political discourse on the internet other than Twitter, but at least everyone joins Twitter expecting to be insulted by eggs. Life is way better without NowThis and article headlines telling me I won’t believe what happens next.
4. Invest my time in books and audiobooks instead.
I’ve dramatically increased the number of non-fiction books I’ve been reading and/or listening to through the magic of Audible. What I didn’t expect was the corollary benefit to my attention span and cognitive processing abilities. Concentrating on a printed page (and I mean an actual printed page, not a Kindle or iPad) has dramatically increased my ability to focus for long periods of time, and also (weirdly) made me less impatient overall.
As for audiobooks, they’re an amazing commute-filler. I spend an hour a day commuting to and from work — that’s an average of 20 hours a month that I’ve been filling with mostly histories and biographies. Beto O’Rourke’s senate campaign was an exciting journey to follow, but one made contextually-richer by understanding Lyndon Johnson’s path through Texas decades ago.
In summary.
Time is our most precious resource. Since I’ve made it a practice to be more deliberate and intentional about the news and data I consume, I’ve actually felt more informed, not less, and way less unhealthy stress to boot. I’m generally of the opinion that we’d all be better off slowing down and taking the time to understand, and not just react.