Input
Make decisions about what forms of media you should engage with and how much.
in order to do Your Own Thinking, you need a Guarded Mind. To follow the metaphor, if you’re building defenses, you can reduce the amount you have to harden the castle if you limit who can enter the kingdom. This is important enough to warrant its own pattern.
Media is entertaining and sometimes informative, but in its quest to make more money, it presents a distorted view of reality, makes you feel bad, and wastes your time.
-
Media is how we connect to larger world, so its not something everyone will want to quit altogether. At the same time, it’s best to be wearing your critical thinking hat when watching, listening or reading media. In most cases, media is funded by advertising. To get paying advertisers, they need an audience, and with all the competition for your attention, getting and keeping an audience is tough.
-
Different media platforms fight to get and keep your attention in different ways. Some, like talk radio personalities, try to work you up and get you angry about the topic of the day. Search engines and social media platforms track what you do, profile you, then attempt to personalize search results and ads according to what they think you want to see. TV advertising, still a broadcast medium, uses every trick in the cognitive science playbook to affect your emotions, make an end-run around logic, and compel you to buy their products. Even news, which we like to think of as being objective, has to compete in this environment, so they increase the intensity of their stories, focus on the scariest events of the day, and pander to the natural biases of their viewers.
-
In short, media gives you a distorted view of reality when you most need an accurate one. And that distortion can affect your emotions in negative ways. Teens and adults using social media regularly report much higher incidence of depression and low self-esteem than people who don’t.
-
A lot of media is using elements of game playing, called gamification, to make your time online more addictive. There’s a reason you feel compelled to look at just one more meme or watch one more YouTube video. It’s also the reason you care about how many “likes” you get or how many people have followed your Twitter feed or subscribed to your YouTube channel.
-
Social Media. They’re watching everything you’re doing, and there are teams of people working to use your cognitive biases against you for the sake of increasing ad revenue.
-
News. Be aware that news means “bad news.” In his book Factfulness, Hans Rosling puts it this way: “Expect bad news […] Remember that the media and activists rely on drama to grab your attention. Remember that negative stories are more dramatic than neutral or positive ones.”
-
Advertising. Advertisers are also using start of the art knowledge about our cognitive biases against us. In Jim Rutt’s words, they are “programming you in ways you’re not even aware of.”
Therefore:
Make decisions about what forms of media you should engage with and how much.
Remember when choosing the media you take in, you want to avoid creating a Bubble by choosing media with a variety of biases