Too much of something can be as bad or dangerous as too little. An example of this is news. Over the past few years, I have found myself obsessively scrolling through news while at the same time, dreading the news I found to read. There is of course a name for this: doomscrolling.
One news app, Flipboard, is particularly bad at enabling doomscrolling. In a real sense, this is what the app was built to do. I found myself routinely flipping through screen after screen of news stories while laying in bed before falling asleep at night. Finally, I came to the realization of how unhealthy this was, and I decided to simply delete the app altogether. This is an app I’ve used for many years, but the decision was the right one. It turns out, I haven’t missed it at all.
There are many aspects of the Apple News app that I despise, even though I continue to routinely use it. Similar to Flipboard, it offers the ability for a user to fine tune what they want to see more or less of, or to block a particular news source or topic altogether. But such a feature is, in my experience, a very blunt instrument and far from perfect. It is not a viable solution because a person’s tastes for news are much more complicated and sophisticated than any algorithm can possibly come up with.
Of course, there is also the significant danger of tuning out information that should really be known, no matter how distressing. Or of excluding perspectives and sources that prevent someone from obtaining a well-rounded picture of what is going on. It is a hard puzzle to solve and frankly, to the best of my knowledge, nobody, no AI-powered solution, no app, no algorithm ever designed, comes close to figuring it out. Perhaps that’s a good thing.
For myself, though, I continue to seek out ways to keep informed that don’t teeter over into obsessiveness about what is negative. Because there is so much that is negative. I am reminded of the verse in the Bible that admonishes us to keep our minds on things that are above (Colossians 3:2) rather than on earthly things. It’s a good reminder but one that can be (and frequently has been) misinterpreted. As another well known aphorism has it, we can be so heavenly-minded that we are of no earthly use.
What I strive for is balance, but that is harder to find these days than ever before.
