Before the advent of the digital age, for someone to be considered a well-informed person – knowledgeable about news, current affairs and events – was a hard-won status. It wasn’t easy to have regular access to the full range of books, newspapers and periodicals we now have at our fingertips. We had to keep our daily appointment with the evening news simply to know what had happened that day.
To be well-informed was, to some extent, an aspirational pursuit. The newspaper you bought would say a lot about that aspiration. Yet beyond acquiring facts or being “in the know”, it was also, at its purest, about cultivating judgment, enriching the inner life, and developing the wisdom to make decisions that might help us prosper and thrive.
Today, access to information is no longer seen as a luxury but as a necessity, despite the heavy irony of it being in far more regular supply than ever before.
Research from Pew, published this month, underscored this, suggesting that the questions of how “closely Americans are following the news, where they get their news and how much they trust the news they see … are not as straightforward as they once were … as people are exposed to more information from more sources than ever before and lines blur between entertainment, commentary and other types of content”.
“People don’t always like news, but they say they need it: while many express negative emotions surrounding news [such as anger or sadness], they also say it helps them feel informed or feel that they ‘need’ to keep up with it,” according to Pew.
While it has always been true that few would readily admit to any kind of ignorance, these days you can inadvertently make such an embarrassing admission by revealing you know too much. This is because the idea that we “need” information has led, by and large, to no longer consuming it to understand the world but instead consuming it just to consume.
This claim isn’t revolutionary – “infobesity” has been around as a term for a while, for example. Like the overconsumption of fast food, many of us are gorging ourselves on information far beyond what we actually need for a healthy life. But the consequences of a data binge are subtler and perhaps more insidious. The deluge often gets in the way of making good decisions.
At least with overeating, the signs of our bad choices are more immediately evident: typically weight gain and a direct correlation with health issues and the general sense of being unwell. With information overload, the links are not always obvious at first. We feel anxious, distracted and overwhelmed, but we often don’t connect these feelings to our overconsumption of data. No one would argue anymore that the effects have been far-reaching, creating volatility and uncertainty across the political, economic and cultural landscape.
A chief topic of interest at the moment – artificial intelligence – has us excitable and fretful as we hungrily absorb as much information about it as we can get hold of. In a sense, we are each of us behaving like large language models, rampantly ingesting vast quantities of data with abandon. But obviously, we are not machines and this isn’t a sustainable state to be in.
We do eventually learn to say enough is enough. Parents and teachers are advocating for limits on screen time for children and organising pledges to delay giving them devices in order to protect them from overuse. Beyond these efforts, the US state of Utah, for example, has tried to enact legislation to limit children’s screen time, and many others have proposed similar moves.
Digital detoxes and digital fasts are wise initiatives, and we should practise them often. But like with any resolution, we eventually we go back to our bad habits.
The long-term solution might be found in a lifestyle change. Yes, we need to have access to information but not constantly. Just as we have intervals between meals to allow our bodies to digest, we need periods during each day when we take a break from consuming news and information, particularly from digital sources. This isn’t only because we necessarily need a break from our screens, but because our minds need time to digest, reflect and synthesise what we’ve already taken in.
My suspicion is that this will probably happen naturally anyway, over time. Subsequent generations are already highly media and technology-literate, and they are very aware of the risks of wanton consumption at younger ages. It won’t be a straight line though. Look how we are still struggling with the consequences of obesity, despite how much we have learnt about nutrition and health.
You see, knowledge isn’t enough by itself to let go of our bad habits. We need to want it, more than we want to have unfettered access to information, to really experience a change for the better.
