What a typical day of “staying informed” looks like for me:
While shoveling cereal or tofu eggs into my mouth I peruse the headlines and opinion pieces in Google News, opening articles in new tabs to quickly digest. Washing things down with coffee I will then run through the newsletter updates and short essays that have landed in my inbox. This is usually pretty quick, so then it is on to aggregators like Hacker News, Reddit, and Instagram, picking out political pieces, or other politically adjacent bits of outrage. Let’s not forget long form essays from the likes of Aeon, Nautilus, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. Bloated with outrage and anxiety I shove off to begin my day. But it won’t be long before it is lunchtime and I’m downing a fresh dose of political commentary and disaster porn masquerading as current events. Lunch is short, so it is back to the grind until the end of the day. Make the way home, have dinner with the family, work out, and then retire to the couch to top off the anxiety by taking another dip in this information river, recapping what we’ve already learned, but delving into the comments and reader reactions from around the world. Incapable of consuming any more, it is time to watch a show with my wife, or sit on the couch and converse about our day.
When I first started writing this post, way back near the end of June, I was spiraling from the continual onslaught of depressing political news. Biden was flailing and unwilling to exit the campaign, the Supreme Court had just handed Trump the political immunity of a king, and after weeks of blatant manipulation, Florida judge Cannon tossed the classified documents theft case. Then there was the Trump assassination attempt. Add a side of natural disasters, and other despairing news and I was looking for the exit.
I made some bold pronouncements about turning away from it all, fantasies of a future day when I looked back with self-satisfaction at how I had been free of the negativity for so long. This was all sunny, rose tinted horseshit in the end. It reminded me of the sudden jolt I’d get as a kid after watching Rocky Balboa do his two minute exercise montage, pumped to begin my own workout routine and to finally shed all of those extra pounds. Just like then, this new resolve lasted for about a day.
Now, it wasn’t all a bad idea. The original text rhetorically asked the necessity of knowing about disasters in far away places that had no impact on me, of knowing of car accidents, bear attacks, robberies, rapes, gangland shootings - and all of the innumerable bits of suffering that happen around the states and the world on a daily basis. All of those things I have absolutely no control over. What purpose did it fulfill to top up on this shit on a daily basis?
Well, at the point Biden dropped out of the race it was impossible to turn away. I had one, maybe two days distance from the last bit of writing on this topic, writing that ended with, and I quote:
“Probably some mental jacking-off here, but it feels like what I have to do. So, this is what I am going to do. Detach from this poison, this river of information and news, and the constant marketing stream and manipulation for clicks and views and the absorption of my time and attention.”
I doubt this resolve would have lasted long. I’ve disengaged a bit in the past, pulled back to a minimum, though I never fully detached, and never for very long. Now, to have such monumental history making in the living moment and to think of disengaging? No way. I don’t have the willpower. The Biden news alone and the massive wave of relief it provided was enough lift to push me back into the informational waters.
Staying informed is a weird concept nowadays. I have better access to information, opinions, and perspectives on any topic, as well as the ability to quickly research and verify the factualness of whatever it is I’m ingesting. All of this power is at my fingertips to come away with “truth”, to be a properly informed citizen, and yet I live in a world where large sections of society choose their own version of truth. I can spend time presenting someone with factual information, only to have them do a quick Google search, pull the first contradicting result, and claim I am incorrect.
It’s been this way for a time, but it sure as hell doesn’t lose its strangeness: as a people, we no longer have a shared perception of reality. All of these powers are at our fingertips and we can’t agree on the reality before our eyes.
I’m old enough to have seen the advent of the internet, the birth of the 24 hour news cycle, the flailing and failing of countless news publications, the internet's endless glut of information and seemingly endless choice. I’m old enough to remember a time prior to this, when there were a handful of major news organizations, a handful of music labels, a handful of radio stations, etc. My American reality was a homogenization of limited sources of input, and those inputs were what was available to everyone. I could easily have a conversation with anyone within 1200 or more miles and we would be able to communicate about current events with a reasonable level of shared perception. We didn’t have to agree on concepts, culture, or politics, but it was likely we both shared the same base perception of reality. It’s not to say this was necessarily better, but if anything, the limitation of input sources made a shared perception of reality much easier to attain.
I don’t know how the younger generation see’s it. I’m talking about gen z and gen z / millennial cuspers, those who have grown up knowing no other world than this one. I doubt many of this cohort even bother with televised news, perhaps even any of the big print news organizations and other news media. I would hazard a guess they get their information from a variety of soundbites and snippets from around the web and predominantly through social media. I don’t know how you stitch together a shared perception of reality from this, but perhaps growing up knowing nothing else there is simply an understanding that this is the way things are?
Author: Jason Jacobs
Jason Jacobs is an artist, project manager, and frontend web designer living and working in Boise, Idaho. Beyond work he spends his time with family, as well as reading, writing articles for Uhmm, and working on his art. All words and opinions, etc., are his and do not reflect the positions or beliefs of anyone other than himself.