Despite not subscribing to political communities and having a large number of content filters based on keywords, my feed here is still for a large part all negative articles and ragebait. Elon Musk this and Israel that. Microsoft ruining windows, AI ruining internet, right wingers and capitalism ruining the world, police being racist and shooting innocent people, companies demanding workers into offices, privacy being under constant attack from all sides… And all this despite the effort I go thru to block that from my view. I can only imagine what the unfiltered feed is like.
I get that this is all important stuff but holy shit it’s depressing when that’s all I read here every day. Sure, some of it is legitimately news worthy but lets be real here; much of it isn’t. It’s just to get you riled up and engaging with the post. It’s the exact same thing all major social media recommendation algorithms are doing; feeding you content that causes outrage to keep you on the platform for as long as possible. Do we really need to know about every stupid thing Elon says or every police shooting where the victim is black?
It’s no wonder so many people, especially younger ones feel absolutely miserable from day to day. It can’t be healthy to live like this. I feel like this kind of media diet is pretty much equivalent to eating fast food every single day.
It might feel pretty dire, but all of this information is critical to understanding and empathizing with the people you might meet in your own society. You can opt out of forums (and should if it’s causing you distress). I wouldn’t suffer a buffer from the negative information if it meant a lack of information in general.
No it’s not. I already know about the issue with police violence in the USA. I don’t need to be reminded about it with daily articles of such individual events. I also know what Elon Musk is like and I don’t need to read a new hit piece on him every time he says something stupid again and then go to the comment section to circle-jerk with all the other haters.
This is recreational outrage. Nobody gets more informed because of this masochism. They just get more angry and cynical. It’s objectively making the world a worse place. Some old granny without an internet access who goes to pick trash from the side of the road is having a bigger positive impact on the world than the vast majority of people posting and reacting to these rage-bait articles.
Then where do I come from? I hope you’re misinterpreting my sentiment, because I feel like we’re on the same page.
Most news and social spaces on the Internet pull people’s focus to issues they have very little control over. This has been shown to cause a degradation in mental health. Since these places have become a mainstay in society, we’ve seen a plummet in mental health. Things can’t get better if everyone is suffering from depression and anxiety.
Being informed enough to support a few (2-3) issues with real intention, can be helpful. But letting corporations and politicians leverage the idea that being informed about everything is good, just leads to them pointing to everything that can be spun as a problem. Then nobody does anything meaningful to affect change. They just feel defeated.
I mean… maybe we’re depressed because of the crushing weight of the real world impacts of what’s being reported on. I absolutely believe that consuming dour media can affect your mood. Plenty of evidence. I’ve also had two friends die of poverty due to their incapability to afford medical expenses.