The information age has turned the experience of news watching from a daily time-slot tradition into a flood of BreakingNews notifications that are at once endless and require your immediate attention. This ongoing flood of information raises some fundamental questions about our ability, individually and collectively, to absorb, make sense of and actively engage with the world around us in an age of unprecedented information surplus.Â
Social media sites send out BreakingNews reports every few minutes which creates a digital environment where headlines with sensationalized content can compete for the attention spans of people already loaded with information. Research has also shown that information overload can create anxiety, stress and a sense of losing control; all the while our need for instant news will often outstrip our mental capacity to receive, process and understand it. Â
The pace of the modern news cycle has fundamentally changed the way stories develop and the way people experience them. BreakingNews alerts tend to come before all context is known (read: reporting, prior to journalistic rigor) in which case initial reports will be amended or corrected later. This shooting-from-the-hip-now-ask-questions-later transmission model inoculates a reflexive response and suppresses deliberative reflection and obstructs our collective ability to get to the bottom of complex issues that need multi-layered thinking to resolve.
In another way, if you have it available to you, research shows that 70% of Americans avoid news stories when they are flooded with news, which represents a broad phenomenon known as news avoidance based on using avoidance as a defensive mechanism against information overload. This appears paradoxical because breaking news presents a growing challenge of being “tuned in” but, unfortunately, resembles “tuning out” with reduced accountability and time to consider and process actions occurring in the world today.
The endless flow of updates, alerts, and information dominating the plethora of social media platforms can quickly overload and produce cognitive noise as people sift and parse through the content. Cognitive overload affects not only personal well-being, but democratic deliberation. Citizens struggle to differentiate basic news from consequential news, contextualize critical developments, and eliminate everyday updates shamelessly broadcasted as breaking news.
Information overload also contributes to the growth of fake news because overwhelmed consumers are less aware of publicly available information and engage with source credibility. With breaking news notifications activating more constantly than ever before, users become less versed in theory and are developing shortened attention spans which can make them more susceptible to misleading headlines or selective facts.
The hook-like qualities of watching BreakingNews are analogous to behavior that looks like online compulsive behavior, propelling these episodic reward systems that are fueled by dopamine; encouraging users’ habitual checking behavior. Followers of BreakingNews are likely to feel anxiety if they are offline for even short periods of time, thus creating fears about missing out on important content that could accompany their lives or their understanding of the world around them.
Social media engagement is prioritized algorithmically and is a challenge for traditional journalism gatekeeping. This is especially true for reliability and relevance. BreakingNews reports tend to spread through social networks before important details can be verified and/or contextualized, creating instances where corrections could be more problematic than that of the original report.
News overload on social media could also strongly direct news avoidance, the urgency to the news, and news filtering behavior, and suggests that too much consumption of information can counterintuitively reduce civic engagement instead of encouraging it. The potential for citizens to turn away from political participation and civic participation is heightened over time for the continuous barrage of updates situates for and continues to encourage more news avoidance behavior.
The prescription is for intentional pre-digital literacy practices and intentional consumption behaviors that prioritize quality over quantity. By designating certain times for news consumption, indexing credible news sources, and creating time and distance from BreakingNews alerts to reflect, we can find balance for information consumptions that have become unhealthy and large.
Finding ways to stay informed while maintaining attention and civic engagement may be one of the major challenges of our generation in a new, unprecedented world of information.
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