To learn about the world beyond their direct experience, even cave dwellers would have had to sift relevant facts from self-interest, gossip, speculation and delusion. Yet modernity did manage to invent its very own challenge - volume.
Relevance used to be a simple function of proximity (‘The farther it is from Kansas City the less it is news’). Stories were about individuals nearby, politics, war and celebrity gossip featuring the upper classes. Yet for people in a globalised world there is no ‘nearby’ - politics halfway around the planet might cost them their jobs. This world is also far more complicated. Numbers, to take just one example, which are relied on heavily in any modern society, can bewilder and deceive without appropriate context; ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics’ quipped Mark Twain. Nowadays news serves not only to inform, but to make the world intelligible. It is more abstract, more reliant on data and expertise and more concerned with context, explanations, trends and making predictions. Storytelling about the individual is now the ‘anecdotal lead’ and journalists, too, have had to specialise (‘Senior Conceptual Art Correspondent’ would not have been funny a century ago). Many act themselves as commentators (think ‘we turn to our business editor to see why’). In 1985 the Pulitzer board awarded its first prize for explanatory work. Meanwhile, critics worry that news has a tendency to turn audiences into consumers and citizens into spectators, cynically feeding people the brain equivalent of deep fried Mars bars: power, fame, scandals, accidents, disaster, sex. And since advertisers moved online, where news sources are two a penny and stories bounce around in social echo chambers, a certain visibility system has replaced the old authority system. How is the news you care about to be fished out?
One idea is to get to know the brands - what helps to decide between 75 types of salad dressing helps here too. Anyone operating in the public space will have a brand and brands, by definition, advertise consistency: it is no likelier to read about the release of Overwatch in The Economist than to find praise for Hillary Clinton in Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. Being consistent, brands can act as handy abstractions over large chunks of ongoing reality. You need discover which brands are best for which information. A well curated Twitter feed of niche, trusted brands may serve better than a single news source of general interest - the larger the audience needing to be satisfied, the less room left for nuance and specific concerns.
Another strategy is learning to spot what Alain de Botton calls ‘archetypes’. The world does not change at the pace of headlines. In reality, there are relatively few primary ideas, like colours, that news stories circulate. Some archetypes might be that all establishment politicians are corrupt or at any rate incompetent, that in a bureaucracy nothing ever changes, that work and romantic love alone can lead to happiness, that everyone is free to achieve anything, that human life is precarious (most stories of accidents, disasters, terrorism and disease fall under this last headline), that nevertheless science and technology are gleefully employed in bringing about the end of history. Or you may discover your own. The point is only to notice that there are far fewer narratives than there are individual news stories. This reduces cognitive overload. Asked to memorise a chessboard in seconds, grandmasters consistently recall the board better than novices because, rather than individual pieces, they notice their commonly occurring configurations.
A third idea is to use persistence, rather than proximity, as an indicator of relevance. If something keeps coming up it might be worth investigating. Anyone ignorant of Brexit, Syria or the US election has more interesting concerns than a lack of skill in keeping up. Important stories linger. The most important move from newspapers into history books, true to the notion that news is a rough draft of history.
Yet in a world of ubiquitous information what may matter most is the ability to make people care. It can be hard to regret tragedies that befall people you never knew existed or engage, without a narrative, the dry facts of modern economics. Human psychology still requires art and storytelling to file away the deluge of information about the world beyond. Longform and other types of realist news can lay the ground for better news absorption, as can books, comedy and other people. If prisons and retirement plans sound dull, try first to learn about them from comedian John Oliver. If foreign lands bewilder, make an immigrant friend. Facebook feeds not only filter news, but filter the ability to care. Heed the cave dweller within and get the news, at least sometimes, by talking to someone you wouldn’t normally talk to.
