Bad News Overload? News Avoidance On The Rise

    On this blog, we strive to uncover relevant and interesting information while avoiding to fall into negativity or conversely techno-optimism. This is a hard task. 

   The feel good, always sunny propaganda is almost always on, inter-spaced by gloom and doom so that in the end, most people give up intellectually. They can sense that the MSM (Main Stream Media) is not telling the truth but then the nonstop flood of sensational information explaining that the end is right around the corner is not helping either, especially as time and again the end doesn't materialize on schedule. 

   So which is it? Paradise or hell? What about more of the same? A struggle against the odds to achieve prosperity while our society remains on the edge of the cliff in an unstable equilibrium as all complex systems do? 

   We are close to the top of a financial bubble, that much is undeniable. The risk of nuclear war remains in the background. War, disease, starvation and death, the four horsemen of the apocalypse are still riding with us and will for a long time.     

   What is essential to understand is that the end is never "The End!" There is always another chapter, although not necessarily a great one. Within a year, two, maybe three, it really doesn't matter, we won't be the dominant intelligence on Earth. And just as apes do not decide for us, we won't be in change anymore. How do we handle the transition? Do we use the technology for war? Or do we surrender our fate and go the ostrich way with our heads in the sand?   

   So (bad and good) news overload? You ain't seen nothing yet! There are too many of us so we are crashing our environment, this is unavoidable. But making a mess of the nest doesn't mean that the bird will not fly soon. I have already written that nobody is going to Mars anytime soon. The dream of Elon Musk is just that, a Star Trek techno-future which forever will belong to the 2020s. But it doesn't mean that nothing incredible will happen and that we are forever stuck in our current predicament. The difference is not between optimism and pessimism, it is between looking forward towards uncertainty and looking backward towards comfort. Your choice!  

Bad News Overload? News Avoidance On The Rise

These days more than ever, it often feels like there’s no end to bad news.

In the age of social media and constant exposure to news, doom scrolling can take a heavy toll on people’s mental wellbeing.

As a consequence, more and more people actively try to avoid the news or at least limit their exposure to it.

As Statista's Felix Richter shows in the chart below, according to the Reuters Institute’s latest Digital News Report, an average of 42 percent of respondents from 48 countries included in the survey said that they sometimes or often actively avoid the news, a significant increase from 29 percent in 2017, when the question was first asked.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Selective news avoidance, as the Reuters Institute calls it, became significantly more widespread across all markets in recent years, with half of all respondents from the United Kingdom and 45 percent of U.S. respondents making an effort to reduce their news intake.

The Reuters Institute finds that news avoidance is often linked with low trust in the news and that there are generally two types of news avoiders: consistent avoiders who typically have low education levels and little to no interest in the news; and selective avoiders who struggle with news overload and try to insulated themselves from certain topic to protect their mental wellbeing.