Reflections on Reading Part 2: The good ol’ days of old-fashioned newspapers and being discerning with your choice of reading
‘We are all familiar with the after-the-fact tone –
weary, self-justificatory, aggrieved, apologetic – shared by ship’s captains
appearing before boards of inquiry to explain how they came to run their
vessels aground and by authors composing Forewords.’
(John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure)
A Foreword
First, I should probably add a [sic] to the quote above, just
after ‘authors’.
Second, what I am posting below is a very lightly
edited little ditty that I wrote specifically for my teenage students a couple
of weeks ago. Though it didn’t take me long to write, I’m pretty hard-pressed
to find much free time to write these days and so I didn’t want it to go
completely to waste. I think (or hope) some of them appreciated it or at least
found it mildly interesting, and I even turned into a sort of reading ‘test’.
It fit in with the topic of the unit we were studying, the media, and I figured they might have been fed up or bored with my endless crapping on about the
‘good ‘ol days’. So by putting into writing, and forcing them to read it by
means of making it a ‘test’, I tricked them into having to read another one of
my rants about the modern world and how it’s turning us into terrible, horrible
human beings.
It’s overly long, could probably do with serious
editing, but I figured I’d leave it, warts and all, for a general audience. It
somewhat fits into my current theme of ‘reflections on reading’. This may only
be part 2, some 2+ months after part 1, but part 3 is about 85% written and I’ve
the noblest intentions of stretching my reflections into at least 4 or 5 parts.
If you actually make it to the end, a postscript
follows.
Herewith, my thoughts on reading news in 2018 and
beyond
17 April 2018
‘It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern
age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of
our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking
which produced many of civilization’s most important achievements has come
under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that
guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings
and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens
are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing
ability to fall asleep when we should.’
(Alain de Botton)
I thought I’d do something different for a change, and
instead of giving you yet another one of my ‘old man’ rants, I’d type it out
and let you read it and slowly digest it instead. I will warn you, however,
that it’s probably full of my ‘old man alerts’ that you’ve had no choice but to
get used to over the past few months. So whereas in the past I often crapped on
whilst speaking, I’m now crapping on on paper. Not literally, thankfully.
In our last couple of classes, it has probably become
pretty clear and evident that I’ve barely got a clue as to what type of ‘media’
your generation are into these days. I’m putting ‘media’ into quotes because
these days, it seems a far cry from the media I grew up with. These days it’s
hardly recognizable and I hardly know my Snapchats from my Instagrams from my
Slacks from my Telegrams from my Twitters (the other day my friend laughed at
me when I said ‘send a tweet’; ‘uh, ‘tweet’ is a verb, you nitwit!’). Is
Myspace still around (ha ha)? Do teenagers in Ukraine use Facebook? And yes, I
exaggerate quite a bit – though I may appear clueless, I’m not entirely
hopeless. I hope.
Now this is definitely a classic ‘old man alert’, but
here it goes: things were so damn different in my day. There was none of this internet
mumbo jumbo and I used to get my news from either the TV on the nightly news,
or more often than not, from a good old-fashioned print newspaper. You know,
the kind that gets ink all over your hands and where the news is already
out-of-date by the time the thing lands on your doorstep. Yes, we used to get
the newspaper delivered, at least in the first 17 years of my life. We had no
choice but to wait for the news. We had no choice but to be patient.
But my goodness, when that newspaper finally arrived –
sometimes it wasn’t until late afternoon – it was pure bliss and utter joy. I’d
grab the paper and immediately turn to the sports section, where I’d pore over
[American] football or baseball box scores instead of doing my homework. And
because I was growing up in Europe, for any football games played on a Sunday
in the US, it wasn’t until Tuesday that I would get many of the scores and be
able to read about the games. The highlights would come on TV late at night or
very early the following morning from CNN, back in the days where CNN was a
brand-new network with a small(ish) audience. If you missed any of the
highlights? Too bad – you missed them. There was no internet, obviously. Even
now, some 20, 25, 30 years later, I might stumble across Youtube highlights of
some old game from my childhood that I vaguely remember reading about, or
perhaps I did in fact see the highlights back then. But as I watch the grainy
footage with terrible camera angles, I’m fondly reminded of the good old days
where we had limited sources and had to patiently wait to find out what had
happened.
When I started university, the internet did of course
exist – hell, I’m not that ancient! – but it was still far more normal to read
the newspaper or get your news from TV (or even radio). Money was tight at uni
so I went to the library to read the paper for free. We also had the Tufts
Daily, and I eventually even started writing music reviews and sports articles
for that. On Sundays I would sometimes splash out on the Sunday Boston Globe,
where I’d spend hours taking in all of the news, especially the sports section.
It was heavenly bliss.
The beauty of the newspaper reading experience in
those days? It forced you to focus, concentrate and really get into depth with
stories. Our attention spans were longer. There was no click-bait and the act
of physically having to thumb through a newspaper exposed us to a range of
articles from all over the spectrum. Thus, you’d get a more well-rounded
approach. There was no so-called ‘filter bubble’.
The online reading experience these days is filled
with hyperlinks ad nauseam, which are terribly distracting and often lead you
to click on more links and by the time you’re finished reading, you have 7 tabs
open and can barely seem to concentrate or remember what you have read. It is,
to put it mildly, very overwhelming.
Years later, when I was studying in Edinburgh, and
when it was so much more ‘normal’ to get your news from the internet, I still
made reading the daily paper a habit. In fact, if I didn’t read the paper every
day I would get grumpy and irritable. I’d sacrifice my actual studying for the
paper, and I truly feel like I learnt more in this way. I was at this point a
regular Guardian reader, a big reason being it was available for half price at
the student union.
Now this may sound a bit like I was torturing myself,
but I used to really force myself to read the first 3 paragraphs of any longer
article. For the shorter ones, scanning the headline sufficed, but it was
amazing what I learned and exposed myself to when I read things I otherwise
might have glossed over. On Saturdays, with the Review section (dedicated to
books and poetry), I was amazed by the authors and things I discovered, things
I wouldn’t have experienced had I only read what I wanted to read, or what I
already knew something about.
Reading the newspaper in public was also, in an odd
way, a very social thing. These days, I almost never see this in cafés,
especially in Kyiv, but in those so-called ‘good old days’, public newspaper
reading was a regular occurrence. With friends, it became the topic of endless,
in-depth discussions, debates and arguments. When I say that I learned more at
Edinburgh from reading the paper, it’s because we discussed so much of what was
happening in the world as it applied to what we were studying. It might sound a
tad nerdy, I know, but it wasn’t always a café, with tea or coffee, where these
arguments were being hashed out. As the day wore on and we moved our gatherings
to the pubs, these ‘discussions’ got a lot more heated and enlightening after a
pint or two.
You perhaps remember this story about the time I went
to a small village – Goring and Streatley was the name – in the English
countryside many a summer ago. There I was sitting at a ridiculously posh
sailing club or something by the river in the late morning quaffing a coffee, reading
the Independent, a left-leaning paper akin to the Guardian (these small English
villages are full of fantastic pubs with some of the finest ale you’ll ever
find, but I was saving that for a bit later in the day). At the table next to
me was a woman and her son (about 9 or 10?) and daughter (13 or 14?), and
glancing over at me, the girl gave her mum a nervous look and said in a
supremely posh voice, ‘mummy, that man over there is reading the Independent!’
to which her mum responded something along the lines of ‘oh, be careful, stay
away from him, just ignore, there are bad men everywhere these days’ as they
furtively avoided looking at me for the rest of the time I was there. (I
probably secretly reveled in torturing them!)
That was another thing about reading in public –
people right away knew your politics from what you were reading. There was no
hiding it if you were a newspaper reader. Of course, these days, whatever your
choice of social media, you can freely choose to post links that will reveal
your political leanings, but in those days there was a lot less vitriol spewed
forth offline than there is today online. The only trolls I knew were the ones
who lived under bridges in fairy tales, not the ones who attack you online.
This may have been a big negative, but it was a way of
attracting like-minded people. But perhaps this wasn’t such a good thing, to
narrow your circle to those who agreed with you? There were other downsides to
newspapers too, especially if you had a strict political allegiance and only
read what you already believed in (remember what this is called? Preaching to
the converted). Growing up in Europe, on American military bases, my source of
newspaper was the Stars and Stripes (a newspaper dedicated to military
personnel outside the US), which leaned conservatively. Much to my chagrin,
when I was 15 or 16, my critical thinking skills were not terribly
well-developed and I tended to focus mainly on the sports section anyway. I
didn’t have access to any other sources of English-language news when I lived
in Spain or Germany. Newspapers had (or have, I should say, they still exist!)
their very own filter bubble not too dissimilar to what you find online now.
The key then, as now, is to be discerning with your
news. I’ve always hated political labels and I like to keep my politics private,
despite what I have already revealed about my reading choices. After
university, I branched out from the Boston Globe (left-leaning) and started
reading the Guardian, the Times of London (right-leaning), the Economist,
Reuters, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the New Statesman, the
Atlantic and Business Week. And, with the exception of the Economist, which I
subscribed to and read cover-to-cover every week, I got most of my news online.
And newspapers started to become less and less common.
But nothing could take away from the pleasure I got
from reading a physical newspaper, even on the underground on the way to work
when the act of folding it and crowded conditions made it hard to read and
irritating to other people (which was actually amusing in a way). There was
still something fun about this – and this was before smart phones and tablets
existed so there was no other way to get the news while commuting. When I was
travelling, I’d often buy something like the International Herald Tribune (a mix
of different newspapers) at inflated prices because it felt so special to read
whilst on holiday. Nowadays, the news follows you everywhere with your phones
and tablets, and there are very nice things about that, but it just doesn’t
feel as special. Getting the newspaper abroad felt like a real treat.
Travelling through London, I’d often buy a Telegraph at the airport because it
came with a free bottle of water. Laugh all you want, but when you’re a student
on a tight budget, that was reason enough to buy a paper. And you’d often be
able to get old free papers that people had left on the plane as you were
getting off. I think, even now, you still get a free bottle of water with the
Telegraph at airports and train stations.
Now, the Telegraph is very conservative (people refer
to it as the Torygraph), and so this was like killing two birds with one stone
– not only did I get the free bottle of water, but it took me a bit outside my
comfort zone and was exposed to a different perspective, what ‘the other side’
was saying. When I was living in Belfast with my Granny, she was a regular
Daily Express reader (a right-wing British tabloid). I flicked through it every
day, and Sundays were the real treat, when she had 5 or 6 newspapers delivered
(all tabloids, and all but one – the Mirror – conservative), and we’d spend the
day whiling away our time digesting the papers. She’d look through my Guardian
every day as well.
And this, I felt then and I especially feel now, is so
important: get outside your comfort zone, away from your filter bubble, and
expose yourself to different viewpoints.
No matter what I read, even when I was reading the print Guardian
religiously every day, I questioned articles and wanted to see what ‘the other
side’ had to say, and to seek out opposing viewpoints. I tried to keep an open
mind, and when I say I hate political labels, I really do. Much of what I read
(you can use the past or present tense with this verb) in the Guardian actually
irritated (or irritates?) me and I always cast a critical eye over what I was
reading (or, what I read), no matter the source. And this is still a valuable
lesson for today.
I’ve shared some of my opinions with you, but I have
always tried to look at things from both perspectives, presenting both sides.
That’s why I always encourage you to think of the pros and cons of whatever
we’ve talked about. Try to see it from the other side’s point of view. Think of
all the different critical thinking tools we’ve discussed – avoiding biases:
confirmation, anecdotal, recency, availability, the straw man, the ostrich
effect, blind spots, stereotyping, generalizing and especially heurestics, or
‘mental shortcuts’. And there are so many more.
Last year I read a book To Save Everything, Click
Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, by Evgeny Morozov which was full
of fascinating yet scary insights into the future of technology. I know I come
across as a curmudgeonly old fart who hates technology, but I do rely on it as
much as everyone else. I suffer from FOMO – the Fear Of Missing Out – and so I
try to read as widely as I can, and my insatiable curiosity means that I often
overexpose myself to stuff to the point where I feel my head is going to
explode. My attention span has suffered. It’s hard to concentrate. I fall for
clickbait. I include loads of links to distract people in my blog posts. I have
trouble sitting and reading longer articles at times.
Morozov covered a lot of ground, but one thing stood
out – we’re getting close to the point, or perhaps we’ve already reached it –
where algorithms and filters determine what we read and what we see, and there
will come a time in future, where even articles and online sources of news will
be tailor-made to reflect only our existing viewpoints. And this, to me, is
downright scary. Our filter bubbles will get even narrower.
‘When the algorithms are making the decisions, people
often stop working to get better. The algorithms can make it hard to diagnose reasons
for failures. As people become more dependent on algorithms, their judgement
may erode, making them depend even more on the algorithms. That process sets up
a vicious cycle. People get passive and less vigilant when algorithms make the
decisions.’
(Tim Harford, Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient
in a Tidy-Minded World)
It’s a crazy world out there and I can barely keep up
with the changes. However you consume your ‘news’, wherever you get it from,
just be careful. Question everything. Check the sources. Seek out opposing
viewpoints. Be civilized and respectful. It can get pretty nasty. Take things –
everything - with a grain of salt. A big, damn whopping grain of salt. Better
even, a massive tablespoon of salt. It was Mark Twain who said that ‘Truth is
stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to
possibilities; Truth isn’t.’ And heed the words of George Orwell: ‘During times
of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.’ Fake news
is ubiquitous.
I will leave you, mercifully, with one final story.
When I travel, I actually try to stay away from the news, at least any online
sources. I use my tablet only for books I’ve downloaded and take the time away
from home to get away from the world of murder, conspiracies, business
shenanigans and whatever other tomfoolery is going on in the world. On my
honeymoon a couple years ago, in Fujairah, at a luxurious all-inclusive resort,
I made it a daily habit after lunch to read the Dubai newspaper (I think it was
called The Gulf News), the old-fashioned print version with dirty ink and all, which
was a bit like the aforementioned International Herald Tribune, a combination
of papers from different sources. I sat in the lounge overlooking the beach,
with a cup of coffee (probably not dark roast, unfortunately, but beggars can’t
be choosers), reading it almost cover to cover. Some might say that wasn’t the
best way to spend my honeymoon, but I also like tiny rituals when you’re away
from home. But my point is this: I read things I wouldn’t have read otherwise.
I learned stuff. I read opposing viewpoints. I got outside my comfort zone, all
the while thoroughly enjoying the process.
Whatever you do, keep an open mind. And listen to what
people have to say.
Postscript
8 May 2018
1. My sister recently came to visit and brought with
her a load of print reading material, among the highlights being the Saturday
Guardian and the Weekend Financial Times (Lunch with the FT is one of my weekly
must-reads). Heavenly bliss? Somewhat. But my initial reaction was ‘damn, this
is overwhelming, who has the time to wade through all of this?’ It would take
hours to get through all the material. And that’s just two papers. My second
reaction was more alarming: my attention span has degenerated to the point
where I found it hard to concentrate on some articles, especially the lengthier
ones that took up a full page. My mind started to wander and I must admit, it
seems easier to digest stories from the comfort of a tablet or Kindle. After
coming to this realization, my next thought was ‘have I succumbed to the perils
of reading [news] in the modern world?’
I’ll leave at this: I guess this is just inevitable.
2. I mentioned Business Week above, but I should also
mention how Bloomberg (who publish Business Week) is one of my primary sources
of news. And I especially enjoy Barry Ritholz’s columns, with his daily
reads/links column one of my absolute must-reads. Though he’s primarily an investment advisor and deals with
financial matters, his daily links very often venture into worlds well beyond
money and finance. He’s particularly big on critical thinking and biases, and
this succinct summary well encapsulates much of the drivel I’ve written above.
I could have saved my students a lot of agony by instead giving them this:
‘And so I once again recommend
that savvy citizens and voters apply the same approach to news consumption that
smart investors use:
·
Only follow trusted sources
that have a track record.
·
Understand your own biases.
·
Be skeptical.
·
Force yourself to understand
opposing views by reading widely.
·
Reduce the amount of buzz and
noise in your consumption.
·
Don't read to confirm your own
views; find things that challenge your positions.’
3. I may have painted a doom
and gloom tale of news and media in the modern world, but for a rosier outlook,
I’ll leave you with this. This made me feel much better after recently
discovering that Bloomberg has now added a paywall. If this is what the future entails,
and if it means paying for good quality news, then I’m all for it. This is an
excellent read:
The Future of News: Automated,
personalized, mobile, paid for, and (eventually) less fake. Quality journalism
is coming back.
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