The Information Diet

News, television and social networks do not contain “nothing important at all”.

Through them people learn about wars, laws, epidemics, work, culture and the lives of their friends. The problem is not the channel itself but the business model of producing attention.

It pays a platform to have you come back more often and stay longer. Strong emotions hold attention better than calm analysis. So a feed mostly shows threats, conflicts, outrage, unusual events, social comparison, and material that confirms your earlier reactions.

This distorts the picture of the world. A rare event shown a thousand times starts to look like an everyday one. An ordinary comfortable life produces almost no news precisely because nothing happened in it.

Giving up information entirely does not suit everyone. You may need to know about changes in your profession, local rules, security threats and government decisions.

It is more sensible to adjust the diet:

• choose a few sources;
• separate news from commentary;
• limit the time;
• turn off notifications you do not need;
• read a digest rather than a continuous feed;
• check anything important against the primary source;
• do not start or end the day with a stream of anxiety.

Nor do social networks prove that their users are unhappy. People post photographs for different reasons: contact, memory, work, pleasure, habit.

But a public feed edits life almost inevitably. We compare our own complete footage with someone else’s selection of good shots. It is a competition the editor always wins.

The best test is simple:

After using this channel, am I better informed, closer to people, or able to act?

If what remains is irritation, envy and forty minutes of vanished time, the channel is performing another function — just not for you.

It is worth recalling how much of what you read last month changed even one action. Usually two or three things add up: a change of rules at work, a filing deadline, a cancelled flight, a relative’s diagnosis. The rest is material a person consumed, felt something about, and did nothing with, because there was nothing to do. This does not mean you should not know about a distant war. It means that a daily update on facts you cannot influence performs the function not of informing but of ritual.

The easiest way to tell the two apart is frequency. Where checking once a week gives you the same knowledge as checking twenty times a day, nineteen of those checks were serving anxiety rather than understanding.