It seems that in the wake of the election there’s a fair amount of us disengaging from the assembly line of the media’s minute-by-minute rush of one thing after another. We’ve been choking on stories like Lucy on chocolate, it’s just too much to swallow. Newspapers, networks and news sites all seem to be failing the moment.
If you feel the same way, Farnam Street’s piece on Arthur Schopenhauer’s essays about writing and reading will resonate well with you, it’s worth a couple minutes of your time <Master Your Attention: Schopenhauer’s Strategy Against Clickbait>. Farnam explains how Schopenhauer saw two different types of writers:
[T]hose who write for the subject’s sake, and those who write for writing’s sake. The first kind have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth communicating, while the second kind need money and consequently write for money.
The business model of newspapers, networks and news sites doesn’t favor informing their readers and viewers, they profit from exciting them, angering them and getting them to talk, complain and come back for more. The best way to avoid this mental and emotional junk food is to simply read something better. Here’s a few titles to consider adding to your diet. You won’t lose weight, but you feel better and might have a better grasp at the sheer enormity of the challenge we’re we’re facing.
Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark – Carl Sagan
This quote below should be enough to whet your appetite
Although I found myself skipping and skimming through Sagan’s detailed take-downs crop circles, UFO abductions ESP and faith healing, the central message is compelling. Maybe the sharp divisions of society aren’t differences of values and views, but of ignorance and information. If you read any part of the book, Chapter 2 is a must.
The Basic Problem of Democracy – Atlantic Monthly, Walter Lippman, November 1919
If the idea that we have an ignorance and information problem has any legs, Lippman can help get it going. Early in this article he sounds like he would also disengage for the storms of social and corporate media like we are:
Time and energy that should go to building and restoring are instead consumed in warding off the pin-pricks of prejudice and fighting a guerilla war against misunderstanding and intolerance.
It’s hard to believe that someone would write this at the dawn of the radio age, in a world of books, newspapers, and landline telephones
News comes from a distance; it comes helter-skelter, in inconceivable confusion; it deals with matters that are not easily understood; it arrives and is assimilated by busy and tired people who must take what is given to them. Any lawyer with a sense of evidence knows how unreliable such information must necessarily be.
But it’s not hard to believe that even though some of us are frustrated by the quality of how much we can see, read, hear and watch, so many others see that abundance as proof. Yet,
There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.
Reading Lippman for the first time can be truly transformative, so don’t miss the chance to read Liberty and the News (1920) and Public Opinion (1922).
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business – Neil Postman
Written as 24 hour cable news was replacing half-hour nightly broadcasts Postman’s book is also dated, yet just as relevant as Lippman. Its a quick and easy read that follows the history of journalism from the printing press, through the telegraph and radio to television, when the news became entertaining more than informative. Like Sagan’s laments about the 8 second sound byte, these mid 80s and early 90s illustrations of the deterioration of attention spans seem quaint by today’s standards, which makes them deeply disturbing.
Commission on Information Disorder. Final Report Aspen Institute, November 2021
If you want to dial that deeply disturbing feeling up to 11, this is for you.
Information disorder is a crisis that exacerbates all other crises. When bad information becomes as prevalent, persuasive, and persistent as good information, it creates a chain reaction of harm.
If you leave the detailed recommendations for another time, this is a less-than-ten-minute read gives framing and language to what we’re facing
The problem extends well beyond state-sponsored disinformation, or health scams promoting miracle cures; it is rooted in broader challenges facing the nation—from increasing income inequality, to decreasing levels of public trust in institutions, to the constant churning cycle of news and information, to the splintering of media writ large, to the explosion of social media. Combined, these enormous changes are fertile ground for the seeds of information disorder.
“Bullshit and the Art of Crap Detection” Neil Postman
Returning to Postman for a final recommendation, this was delivered at the National Convention for the Teachers of English in 1969. Dated, but absolutely right on target for today.
As I see it, the best things schools can do for kids is to help them learn how to distinguish useful talk from bullshit. I will ask only that you agree that every day in almost every way people are exposed to more bullshit than it is healthy for them to endure, and that if we can help them to recognize this fact, they might turn away from it and toward language that might do them some earthly good.
This might leave you with the cautious optimism of Charles Mackay (Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds)
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.