We must rethink the news consumption

The time we live in is a time of digital communication. The number of people who get the information from online-sources is now bigger than of those, who get their news from TV or newspapers. And from some perspective, it's great - big traditional medias had to have some owners behind them who used it to promote their own agenda, and now everyone can be media of their own. From the other hand, often such information has no value at all and creates informational pollution.

While we talk about plastic pollution, info pollution can be dangerous as well. Because of informational overload, provocative articles, manipulative headlines and other things which are common nowadays, people can possess anxiety, panic attacks and stress. If you open your feed right now, you'd see that the updates are happening every minute and it's simply impossible to follow all the changes with a clear head after some minutes already. As human beings, we are not used to process such amounts of information, and the worst fact is this information, in most cases, is useless. 

Studies show, that today people spend something like 15 seconds on average to read the article. In this time the only thing you get is, probably, a headline and some additional text if the headline is small and you are a fast reader. Long-reads are dead - nobody wants to read a huge article which actuality will expire in 3 days and which will be drowned in updates in an hour. Instead of reading the stories, we read the headlines.

And what media do nowadays is follow the trend. It is considered as a bad tone to make click-baiting headlines, however, they try to make them as attractive as possible, sacrificing actual representation of what the article is really about. They also try to come up with the headline as fast as possible - if you will be the first to post it, you'll get the most likes, right? But this concept works for a newspaper in the 19th century - when to spread the word you needed a reporter on the other part of the world telegraphing what they saw to put it to tomorrow's paper so you will be at least a day faster than others. Nowadays, you can be only faster for a few minutes, and then - informational wave will crush you, and 3 hours later no one will even remember, what you wrote this morning.

But what if we would change that? Just imagine - instead of having empty headlines popping up every minute, you'd have a compilation of information, which was compiled with the goal not to be the fastest, but to be accurate and useful for the reader. When I read news articles, I don't want to make myself tired with emptiness and complete research of my own. I want to have a new, complete picture in my head after I finish it, and get the feeling that now I knew more than I did before. 

Luckily, the news market is ruled by the same principle as any other market - as customers, we can demand other approach and support only those articles, which meet our requirements. So, next time you are going to read some news, think what do you actually want: a complimentary story with some value in it, or just a set of loud phrases without any meaning?

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_pollution
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicolemartin1/2018/11/30/how-social-media-has-changed-how-we-consume-news/#4a6e3af03c3c
• https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/risj-review/what-do-news-readers-really-want-read-about
• https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/12/10/social-media-outpaces-print-newspapers-in-the-u-s-as-a-news-source/