This week, we do a wee book review, tackle the resurgence of elitism in information and explain why "staying informed" does not make you a good person.
At the market on Saturday, my 15 year old daughter came running up to me at the book table. “Mum! This is a bit of you.” She handed me a little hardcover book, titled Stop Reading the News: A manifesto for a happier, calmer and wiser life by Swiss author Rolf Dobelli.
What happened when I quit the news
I quit the news two years ago, as I wrote about here:
Alicia McKay
In that Friday Flurry, I described the four shifts I've noticed in my two years without news:
- Small talk changed as I lost reference points - and people raised eyebrows at me for not fulfilling my moral or civic duty to stay informed.
- News headlines and social media comment sections started looking like satire for their bias and hypocrisy.
- I became more able to listen and empathise with people that had very different social or political views
- Politicians began to seem less villainous and more like social avatars.
The first shift only took a few months, but the last few took over a year to really kick in.
With this context in mind (and undisguised delight that my kids listen to me,) I happily chewed through Stop Reading the News on my flight to Tassie on Monday.
Book review
Overall, Dobelli makes all the arguments you'd expect: the news is biased, constant and distracting. It makes us anxious and wastes our time. It's inflammatory, sensationalist, and geared to get us outraged and upset, rather than informing us. Over time, a steady diet of short-form news will rewire our brains, making it harder for us to stick to nuanced, deeper content like books and long-form journalism.
But there's a few things about this book that stuck out to me:
First you get the prescription, then the diagnosis.
It is rare for a book to start by telling you what to do. Usually a compelling case is built first. This book is unequivocal in its recommendations (quit news, now, and replace it with high-quality long-form information about things in your circle of competence, ignore everything else). Reasons are offered later.
I wonder how well this works for people who aren't already sold - though, I suppose they might not have picked up the book in the first place.
Dobelli does a comprehensive job of spelling out reasons to quit, and of tackling objections (staying informed, moral duty, etc), but his sourcing is woeful and his claims needlessly overinflated at times. That's a shame (and kind of ironic) because it detracts from the credibility of the work.
Information elitism - is history repeating itself?
In a brief history of news, Dobelli mentions that before broadsheets were widely circulated, there was a thriving industry of private newsletters with handsome subscription fees, targeted to merchants and bankers, with trade and shipping information. The rest of the market was dominated by pamphlets of religious and political propaganda.
This was over 500 years ago, but feels eerily prescient. With newsrooms tanking, will accurate or quality information become an elite luxury once more? Given the (successful) switch of New Zealand's NBR to a subscriber-only model - Todd Scott claims to have over 14,000 people paying $499 a year - the rise of independent journalism on Substack, and my own paywalled cultural criticism and resources, I wonder.
News, Dobelli claims, no longer gives people an information advantage of their peers and colleagues. Not just because over half of what we read online is now fake, but because it's too shallow to be helpful. For an advantage, you'll need depth and context - so skip the headlines, and read long-form instead. Pay for quality.
In today's information environment, people with the resources (time, money, or both) to read deeply will be the ones with the advantage. I suppose that's no different to any other time in history, but given how much information and news the average person now inhales a day, it's a worry.
I'm writing more about information literacy, and how to survive in the swamp, in an upcoming essay. The working title is Work Harder For Your Opinions.
Drop your thoughts, comments, requests or wonderings for this essay in the comments - or respond to me directly.
Breaking news is irrelevant and harmful
Dobell is firm on this: a hot-take delivered as things are happening offers us no better understanding of the world - and instead pushes us toward shallow, fleeting views and warped perspective. Because news disproportionately focuses on low-probability, high-impact risks like terrorism and plane crashes, consuming it exacerbates our existing cognitive biases and makes it harder for us to make good decisions.
He also argues that the news gives us the illusion of meaning, but because it's short, written quickly and never followed up, it makes us shallow, reactive thinkers. We're better to wait months or years for the book if we really want to understand what happened.
I agree vehemently with this. Less news, more books has been my mantra for a while now. It requires making peace with not being 'up-to-date' and releasing the social guilt that comes with that - as though me knowing the latest developments in global conflict was ever making a jot of difference.
Busting the "illusion of empathy" and tackling guilt
The most compelling argument was buried toward the end.
Many of my peers and colleagues consume the news because of a sense of moral or civic duty to stay informed. Dobelli tackles this bluntly: consuming media is a poor proxy for empathy or humanity. It helps nobody but news outlets and advertisers. If you want to help, you have to take action. In short: donate.
"If you really care about the fate of earthquake victims, war refugees or famine victims, give money. Not attention. Not work. Not prayers. Money." - Rolf Dobelli
This point deserved a lot more space, and is something I've thought a lot about as I grapple my liberal guilt since quitting the news.
In the marketing-heavy world we live in, we've come to worship at the alter of "awareness" as though it's some kind of inherently useful thing. If more people know, we reason, something will have to get done.
Except... it doesn't, does it? News consumption and online virtue-signalling does nothing more than make you angry and fuel sanctimony. It has never stopped a war or created climate action. Real life action is the only thing that will do that. News will drive you to siloed and intolerant political beliefs on the one hand, and overall futility on the other. It's not the way to create social change.
Alicia McKay
A collection of snippets and quotes I liked:
- "Psychological nutrition" - information "junk-food" is bad for your health.
- On re-reading: if a book is teaching you something new, re-read it as soon as you're finished it. You'll get 10x as much (not 2x as much) out of it the second time.
- Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything published is utter crap - always has been, always will be.
Til next week,
AM
