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‘Staying Informed’ Shouldn’t Mean Constantly Retraumatizing Yourself
Consuming upsetting junk data is not your civic duty
In the age of doom scrolling, people tend to equate “staying informed” with “constantly retraumatizing yourself with endless exposure to new details about horrible issues you were already intimately aware of.”
It’s hard to stay away from Twitter, even if you’ve already read all the headlines, all the bad takes riffing on those headlines, and all the even worse takes riffing on those bad takes. Even though you already know how the presidential debate is gonna play out, it’s easy to feel some ethical obligation to watch it. You want to be informed.
Is it working? Is it helping? Is knowledge still power, or is there a point where it becomes a cage?
Knowledge can give people a sense of control and purpose, especially when that knowledge is provided by the internet — research shows that when people are holding their smartphones, they report feeling more psychologically powerful. When you take a person’s phone away, their confidence and sense of security drops.
Phones put us in contact with the wider world, granting us access to a new universe of constantly-updated information. But much of the “knowledge” on the internet is complete junk data, a sea of nonsensical comments, bad faith takedowns, inflammatory screeds, and journalistic speculation that won’t ultimately bear any fruit. The more you follow the news, the more news there seems to be — but that’s because you can no longer separate the wheat from the chaff.
Take the presidential debate Tuesday night. If you followed it, you probably didn’t just watch the debate itself — you also followed your friends’ reactions on Facebook and Twitter, and consumed a fair amount of postmortem reporting, too. Right after debate, you might have seen headlines declaring the whole thing to have been a mess for both parties. The earliest reporting took the classic “both sides” approach, saying that both Biden and Trump came out of the interruption-filled shitshow looking bad.
But then there was a backlash to that stance. A pretty rapid and extreme one. Viewers and commenters raged against both-sides-ism, asserting that this was not, in fact…
