SURVIVING (BAD) NEWS

Summary: the constant wave of negative news surrounding us tests us, creates desensitization, and hypersensitivity. Listening to and processing this information meets our primary survival need. But how do we resist when it becomes overwhelming?

Even single-celled organisms like amoebas or molds, in their own small way, are equipped to explore their environment, sense dangers, and exchange information. Just imagine how sensitive and equipped humans can be.

Yet, with the overwhelming and constant flood of negative news from our surroundings, the current informational context really puts us to the test. However, there is a solution to overcome it.

Increasing Bad News

The number of negative news stories we encounter daily is on the rise. Is that true? A rational first response might say no. After all, the volume of news we face hasn’t increased because not many more events are happening. We are simply exposed to many more informational channels.

This response supports the idea that it’s merely the frequency of our exposure that has increased, thanks to the globalized information landscape provided by technology: even distant information reaches us today. But this is only a partial, albeit rational, answer.

There are now millions of people communicating, producing information, or pseudo-information in the form of content, which somehow increases the total number of elements the environment sends our way.

Not many more trees fall in the forest, but many more people are there to tell the tale.

Therefore, a climatic event, an accident, a conflict, inflation, and all risks—including nuclear and financial—can generate a cyclone of negative news that surrounds us so effectively it gives us a general sense of being overwhelmed.

Not many more trees fall in the forest, but many more people are there to tell the tale.

Hypersensitivity from overload

Whether it’s the melting of a glacier, the impending extinction of polar bears, or an eruption in Iceland, the effect of the barrage of negative information on our emotional and cognitive state is now well established.

The overload of emergency-laden news can lead to hypersensitivity towards it, even creating a sort of anticipatory anxiety—a constant state of alertness. What are the ingredients of this supposed hypersensitivity?

In news anxiety, we can find two key elements: a sense of loss of control, as we feel like passive subjects in an overwhelming environment, and a loss of clarity, because everything seems important.

Desensitization

So, we are bombarded by uncontrolled informational cyclones that generate anxiety. What other consequences might this have on our ability to process stimuli from our surroundings?

To respond, let’s first consider the dynamics that drive social media: there’s competition among user profiles and information producers aimed at capturing attention and seeking clicks.

This increasingly manifests in two ways: the injection of sensationalism and the hyper-exposure to dramatic news. Negative news of the moment is seized upon because it can mobilize user attention.

And where’s the cognitive downside? It consists of the erroneous perception that only one thing is happening, as this dominates the scene, fully controlling our attention and emotional state.

The greatest risk, in this case, is desensitization. This is perhaps what philosopher Paul Virilio was referring to in his book Panic City (2004) when he spoke of the indifference to horror that spread after the traumas of World War I to which the entire population was exposed.

And where’s the cognitive downside? It consists of the erroneous perception that only one thing is happening, as this dominates the scene, fully controlling our attention and emotional state.

Addiction and doomscrolling

Beyond the intolerance of any minor traumatic news and insensitivity to each one, there’s a third possible consequence of continuous exposure to this type of information.

In 2020, the Oxford Dictionary included the term “doomscrolling” among its words of the year, referring to the obsessive search for negative news online, with unwanted effects on health.

Thus, among the listed hypotheses, the increase in negative news can also have significant effects on our cognitive abilities, including the creation of dependency.

Possible Solutions

So, what solutions are available?

To find some, we might take a step back in time and return to the origins of our existence. The most primal possible. The reason we are drawn to this information is, in fact, ancestral and fundamentally healthy, tied to our physiological need for survival.

It is survival that captures our attention in that moment.

We seek it to prepare for escape and to generally mount an effective and immediate response to current or imminent dangers, for ourselves and our community.

At this point, we face a serious problem: if capturing and processing negative information and news is physiological and rationally responds to our survival needs, how do we deal with it in such massive quantities?

The poet Giuseppe Bonaviri wrote about fear: the best way would be to contain, filter, and quickly metabolize all the fear-inducing factors that assail us from every side.

This is a costly and demanding program that requires the development of a new informational intelligence, one suitable for a news landscape that changes with technological advances but remains firmly anchored to a human—and indeed animal—need.

Article published in Changes.