My text last week was about the culture of indignation, very present in the media. In The duty Friday, a fascinating and disturbing text by Annabelle Caillou added depth to my reflection. She was talking about information fatigue.
Faced with information overload, more and more Quebecers are deciding to actively avoid the news. There would be a direct link between stress and information. From the interviews conducted by the journalist and the studies consulted emanates the fact that the media exhaust the citizen with their repetitive news, their polarizing opinions, their overload of information.
This subject appeals to me because the news is my bread and butter, on which I base a large part of my interpretation of the world. It’s my job. However, I am like the citizens she interviewed. Because despite my very diverse informative menu, I have considerably reduced my dose for months. I hardly watch national TJs anymore. Regularly, I ignore international news. Some days, one hearty radio bulletin is enough for me. I worry.
What I live, what relates The duty, I see it everywhere around me. Many people are cutting the cord that connects them to the news, choosing what enters their brain, deciding to drink from other sources, others are “intermittent fasting” for information.
All of this is worrying, because citizens who ignore the news are ultimately bad for democracy. It is (traditionally) being informed that makes us better citizens, involved people, motivated teachers, even concerned activists.
When asked, the reasons given by the defrocked are numerous.
They are tired of opinions that supplant facts, tired of professional haranguers. Some deplore the rise of militant, camped and moralizing journalism. Here, as in the United States and France, there is also this growing distrust of the large capitalist groups that control press groups, which gives information that is politically tainted.
Among the factors contributing to mass fatigue is Quebec’s obsession with news stories, which adds to the misery of the world by depicting cutthroat neighborhoods and increasingly violent cities, trivialized crime that discourages and worries everyone.
misinformation and fake news Moreover, widespread induce such doubt in our minds that many withdraw, suspicious, scalded, annoyed to be taken for idiots. Add the saturation effect caused by the info-show and the info continues and we will be surprised to see so many people saying beuby to Celine Galipeau…
Much of the fatigue that many of us feel when faced with information may also come from another, very subtle element. One has the impression that the news and its crazy race ARE THE REAL, of which the information would speak. Broadcasts, newspapers: everything is built around the idea of current events. But nothing is more outdated than yesterday’s news. News cycles follow one another at a breakneck pace.
In the media, there is this idea of spread the news, to talk, to have a scoop. News is what the media construct. We can doubt, and many do, that it has a link with the real.
THE real, it is often the daily problems, not very photogenic, housing, the agricultural crisis, the transmission of farms, food insecurity, day-to-day climate issues, regions that experience repeated problems far from the national media. The real requires time, listening, depth. We hear little of the stories of people who have been living peacefully here for three months or three centuries. And once every four years, we plant a thermometer in the great social body, and we are surprised at its weariness. We are surprised by his concerns, his way of voting, of thinking. But what news teaches us about people’s interests and concerns? A large part of the population is fed up with the media because it does not recognize itself in it.
In 1998 (formerly!) Ignacio Ramonet, then director of Diplomatic worldalready wrote in The tyranny of communication that getting informed is tiring. That it’s a lot of work, that you have to make a constant effort to choose and vary your sources of information. And it was already true in this world where manipulations were not deep fake, where information technologies played, but not as much as today, a central role. But communication was already exercising its tyranny. Twenty-five years later, a large part of the population everywhere is quitting and listening to music. Or hucksters… Inquiring is exhausting…
People leave. Cover their ears. Go look elsewhere, sometimes on the margins, for their information. How to reinterest them, us? Can we do it? This will require a lot of courage and humility from the media. And probably different directions.
We are, however, at a turning point. We all need to wake up.