The Mindful Media Diet: How to Consciously Consume the News

How do we consume media? Credit: Positive News/Freepik

by Matt Hersh, Open Democracy: https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/matt-hersh/mindful-media-diet-how-to-consciously-consume-news

Understanding how we digest the news gives us the power to stop being passive media consumers and benefit our well-being.

“Do we have to watch the knife and gun report again?” my wife and I would lament to each other every night early in our marriage.

We eventually decided to stop watching the evening news, feeling relentlessly inundated with shocking images and sickening stories of greed, hatred, trauma and callous acts of inhumanity.

It’s not that natural disasters don’t exist or that there isn’t plenty of hard-hearted behaviour in this world. And a newscast might indeed include something positive. But it would typically be fleeting and overshadowed by darker and more fear-mongering stories. These stories were sure to grab a hold of your amygdala, the fear centre of the brain, and not easily let go.

As we watched night after night, we unwittingly and fairly mindlessly (at first) became products of a news media that portrayed our world as severely broken with no hope or sun behind the dark clouds. Why was the news affecting us so much? Why did we choose to turn away from most news sources? How we consume and digest our news media are two vital factors to consider that can help answer these questions. Fortunately, they are also two such factors that we have more personal control over.

News media consumption

We can think about how we get our news as akin to how we consume our food. Consumption is basically all about the patterns and frequencies with which we take in something external to us - like saturated fat, sugar or vegetables.

So when we ask about how often an individual or a particular demographic tunes in to watch the nightly TV news or checks out a news article on a smart phone news app, we are seeking relatively quantifiable data about news media consumption. For example, the vast majority of American college students are constantly on their phones wherever they go, and the vast majority actively seek out “breaking news” much more than “sports news” or “local news”.

And because smart phones are a veritable extension of the arms of most college students (and most other demographics for that matter), students are more or less consuming their (breaking) news on autopilot - simply because it’s there (remember the last time you finished off that bag of crisps just because they were already open and on the table in front of you?).

News media digestion

If news media consumption is all about patterns and frequencies of taking in different types of news, then digestion can be thought of as the process of how the media actually feels when it “goes down,” how it gets absorbed into our psyches, and how it affects us emotionally and socially over the short and long term. Our past experiences, personalities, sensitivities, proclivities, relationships and cultural climate all influence the digestive process.

Think about food again for a moment: if you constantly eat foods high in sugar, you will most likely feel the physical, emotional and mental effects of such a consumption pattern. And if your spouse snacks on sugary treats throughout the day, you may follow suit more or less mindlessly as is often the case with food consumption patterns in families.

News media digestion is really no different. If you surround yourself with particularly pessimistic people, hearing about the latest crisis in the Middle East, for example, might further your sense of hopelessness about a resolution to any geopolitical and religious battle across the globe. If you tend to be a highly optimistic person, perhaps even the most horrific of breaking news stories may not break your sense of hope for a more positive world.

Mindless consumption, unhealthy digestion

Imagine running into friendly people wherever you go, and these people hand you delicious chocolates. Just a few pieces at a time, every few hours, here and there. Presuming you are otherwise healthy, the effect might be a subtle change in your behaviours and attitudes. If you enjoy chocolate, you might change your daily routine to make sure you got more. But chocolate also has a way of attracting our attention; even if we weren’t intending to consume it, we might if it were handed to us.

So here is the rub: in our contemporary digital media age, we are bombarded by news media of which we are not fully in control. Images and stories are handed to us, like the chocolate, at the supermarket checkout line, on our phones, on TV, on the radio. This doesn’t allow for conscious consumption to fuel healthy digestion.

A promising solution: the mindful media diet

Mindful awareness is the act of intentionally bringing our attention to our present moment with curiosity and acceptance. It is one way to help ourselves simultaneously stay grounded, inquisitive and informed.

By adopting a mindful media diet, we are purposefully choosing to tune in or tune out based on our current mood, our short-term goals, and our longer-term values. This is a very different endeavour to mindlessly tapping our phones while standing in line for coffee and checking our automatically set alerts and notifications about the latest crime, economic crisis or accident.

Here are some suggestions for specific ways to adopt a mindful media diet:

1. Look for the silver lining

We must remember that there is more right with this world than wrong with it, no matter what we perceive or are told. We deserve this as a matter of being human. From a purely utilitarian vantage point, it helps us stay grounded, positive, and better able to solve the real problems before us. Fred Rogers, champion of kindness and host of the popular Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood children’s show, captures this tenet beautifully: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

2. Purposefully and intentionally seek out news sources that are constructive, honest and forward thinking

These can serve to illuminate the hidden treasures and gifts of the world, whether they manifest as good deeds of an individual or group or as the compassion and connection that already exist around us.

3. Cultivate curious and intentional awareness as you consume your news

This can facilitate a healthier and less disruptive digestive process. Ask yourself how this “news meal” might feel as it is consumed. Pause for a moment before tapping your news app and ask yourself “what is my intention right now?”. Project into the future for moment to help determine what it might feel like to continue consuming in this way. Then decide for yourself (rather than have external forces decide for you) what and how you consume next.

4. Limit your news media minutes

Following a mindful media diet entails making sure you are not consuming news on autopilot, spending hours a day lost down the rabbit hole of global crises or chronic problems of your country. Literally setting a time limit for smart phone news use can be very liberating (albeit awkward at first). And turn off your TV after a few minutes of news rather than feeling compelled to tune for a full 30 or 60 minutes just because that’s how long the news show lasts.

News media consumption is an art with tremendous real-world application. When you consciously and intentionally gain more influence over what you take in, you can digest with greater peace of mind and with greater benefit to yourself and everyone else around you. What we take in about our world can actually influence what we give back. Let’s all start our mindful media diet today!

This article was originally published by Positive News.

The Lonely American

(Photo: Seth Wenig / AP Photo)

by Chris Hedges, Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/29/lonely-american

Michael P. Printup, president of Watkins Glen International, one of the country’s largest racetracks, stood with a group of about a dozen race fans at 8:30 a.m. Saturday. Next to him were boxes of free doughnuts and coffee.

A line of men with towels, who had spent the night in nearby RV campers, pop-up campers and tents, stood patiently outside the door to a shower room. A light drizzle, one that would turn into a torrential downpour and lead to the races being canceled in the afternoon, coated the group, all middle-aged or older white men.

They were discussing, amid the high-pitched whine of cars practicing on the 3.4-mile, 11-turn circuit racetrack, the aging demographic of race fans and the inability to lure a new generation to the sport. “Maybe if you installed chargers for phones around the track they would come,” suggested one gray-haired man.

But it is not just sporting events. Public lectures, church services, labor unions, Veterans of Foreign Wars halls, Masonic halls, Rotary clubs, the Knights of Columbus, the Lions Club, Grange Hall meetings, the League of Women Voters, Daughters of the American Revolution, local historical societies, town halls, bowling leagues, bridge clubs, movie theater attendance (at a 20-year low), advocacy groups such as the NAACP and professional and amateur theatrical and musical performances cater to a dwindling and graying population.

No-one is coming through the door to take the place of the old members. A generation has fallen down the rabbit hole of electronic hallucinations - with images often dominated by violence and pornography. They have become, in the words of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, “atomized,” sucked alone into systems of information and entertainment that cater to America’s prurient fascination with the tawdry, the cruel and the deadening cult of the self.

The entrapment in a world of nonstop electronic sounds and images, begun with the phonograph and radio, advanced by cinema and television and perfected by video games, the Internet and hand-held devices, is making it impossible to build relationships and structures that are vital for civic engagement and resistance to corporate power. We have been transformed into commodities.

The steady decline of the white male heaven that is NASCAR - which has stopped publishing the falling attendance at its tracks and at some speedways has begun to tear down bleachers - is ominous. It is the symbol of a captive society.

“We don’t see the youth coming in,” Printup said. “The millennial, the younger adults 18 to 35, is our target. We spend millions of dollars a year to target that group. But it’s hard. Look around. Who’s the youngest person here? That’s our problem. Every sport from the NFL to NHL is struggling with the 18 to 35 demographic. They call them weird. They call them difficult. They only want to look at their computers.”

Printup’s parent company, the International Speedway Corp. (ISC), has invested significant sums to reach this demographic with little to show for it. “We have a digital firm that represents nearly all our tracks in the ISC,” he went on, noting that Watkins Glen, which drew about 16,000 fans this past weekend, is one of the few exceptions to the decline in numbers. “The digital platform is about the only way you can get to them. We target them. We buy lists. We hire an agency that tracks their Web and Internet interactions. If they bring up racing, we want to be there. When a kid Googles ‘Ferrari - racing - sports car’ we are one of the top 10 lists. We pay for that. It is not cheap. That’s how you have got to get these kids. But it’s not working the way it should.”

Robert D. Putnam pointed out the decline of independent civic engagement, or what he called our “social capital,” in his book “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.” He noted that our severance from local communal and civic groups brought with it not only loneliness and alienation, but also a dangerous and passive reliance on the state.

Totalitarian societies, including our own, inundate the public with a steady stream of propaganda accompanied by mindless entertainment. They seek to destroy independent organizations. In Nazi Germany the state provided millions of cheap, state-subsidized radios and then dominated the airwaves with its propaganda. Radio receivers were mounted in public locations in Stalin’s Soviet Union; and citizens, especially illiterate peasants, were required to gather to listen to the state-controlled news and the dictator’s speeches. These totalitarian states also banned civic organizations that were not under the iron control of the party.

The corporate state is no different, although unlike past totalitarian systems it permits dissent in the form of print and does not ban fading civic and community groups. It has won the battle against literacy. The seductiveness of the image lures most Americans away from the print-based world of ideas. The fascination with the image swallows the time and energy required to attend and maintain communal organizations. If no one reads, why censor books? Let Noam Chomsky publish as much as he wants. Just keep his voice off the airwaves. If no one attends community meetings, group events or organizations, why prohibit them? Let them be held in near-empty rooms and left uncovered by the press until they are shuttered.

The object of a totalitarian state is to keep its citizens locked within the parameters of official propaganda and permanently isolated. Propaganda and isolation make it difficult for an individual to express or carry out dissent. Official opinions, little more than digestible slogans and clichés, are crafted and disseminated by public relations specialists on behalf of the power elite. They are repeated endlessly over the airwaves until the public unconsciously ingests them.

And the isolated public in a totalitarian society is unable to connect its personal experience of despair, anxiety, fear, frustration and economic insecurity to the structures that create these conditions. The isolated citizen is left feeling that his or her personal misfortune is an exception. The portrayal of society by systems of state propaganda - content, respectful of authority, just, economically secure and free - is mistaken for reality.

Totalitarian propaganda, accompanied by isolation, or what Arendt called “atomization,” makes it possible for a population not to “believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself.” This propaganda, Arendt went on, “gave the masses of atomized, undefinable, unstable and futile individuals a means of self-definition and identification.”

Corporate propaganda saturates the public, especially a generation wedded to new technology, with these lies. Its power, however, comes from the meticulous study of the moods, prejudices, whims and desires of the public, to manipulate the masses in their own language and emotions. Konrad Heiden made this point when he examined fascist propaganda in Nazi Germany, noting that propaganda must detect the murmur of the public “and translate it into intelligible utterance and convincing action.”

“The true aim of political propaganda is not to influence, but to study, the masses,” Heiden wrote. “The speaker is in constant communication with the masses; he hears an echo, and senses the inner vibration.”

Heiden, forced to flee Nazi Germany, went on: “When a resonance issues from the depths of the substance, the masses have given him the pitch; he knows in what terms he must finally address them. Rather than a means of directing the mass mind, propaganda is a technique for riding with the masses. It is not a machine to make wind but a sail to catch the wind.”

Dissent will only be possible when we break the dark spell of corporate propaganda and the isolation that accompanies it. We must free ourselves from corporate tyranny, which means refusing to invest our emotional and intellectual energy in electronic images. We must build what the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin  called “voluntary associations for study and teaching, for industry, commerce, science, art, literature, exploitation, resistance to exploitation, amusement, serious work, gratification and self-denial.”

“We know well the means by which this association of the lord, priest, merchant, judge, soldier, and king founded its domination,” Kropotkin wrote. “It was by the annihilation of all free unions: of village communities, guilds, trades unions, fraternities, and medieval cities. It was by confiscating the land of the communes and the riches of the guilds; it was by the absolute and ferocious prohibition of all kinds of free agreement between men; it was by massacre, the wheel, the gibbet, the sword, and the fire that Church and State established their domination, and that they succeeded henceforth to reign over an incoherent agglomeration of subjects, who had no direct union more among themselves.”

Corporate propaganda has become so potent that many Americans are addicted. We must leave our isolated rooms. We must shut out these images. We must connect with those around us. It is only the communal that will save us. It is only the communal that will allow us to build a movement to resist. And it is only the communal that will sustain us through mutual aid as climate change and economic collapse increasingly dominate our future.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.