News travels fast. So fast, these days, that had the “shot heard round the world” occurred today, all corners of the globe would have been aware of it before the fog cleared the Lexington village green. But technology enabling the speed with which information travels also enables higher quantities of information to travel with it. Just take a glimpse at any major publication’s homepage and you’ll see so many articles it would take the whole day just to read through them all. That doesn’t even include the 24-hour coverage on television. There is so much news out there that inevitably most of it falls by the wayside.
Yet this is not a new problem. Selectiveness has always been a necessity in the news industry, from the age of the town crier all the way up to social media. But thanks to technology, more can be brought to your doorstep, which is overwhelming individuals and detrimental to discourse.
In early 2018, Pew Research found that nearly seven in 10 Americans feel overwhelmed by the news. This starkly contrasts a poll by the same firm four years earlier in which only 26 percent felt information overload. In the span of four years, the information strain increased 42 percent. On top of that, a Gallup survey published in January 2018 found that 58 percent of Americans say it is harder to stay well-informed thanks to the overabundance of news.
Sifting through what’s newsworthy and what’s not is clearly more difficult as the amount of news increases.
Additionally, only 44 percent of Americans can name a media source that they believe to be objective in its reporting. As a result, individuals fall back on their habitual news sources that confirm their preconceived notions. One in four Americans admitted to getting their news from only one viewpoint, and that doesn’t even represent the problem many polls run into: respondents honestly answering questions about practices that might be unfavorable. It is likely that, among other things, information overload has greatly contributed to the hyper-partisan nature of political discourse today. Americans are talking themselves into their own corners, which leads to a great divide between the two dominating views. Rather than seeing individuals as just that (with their own unique set of ideas and priorities) it has become a bilateral choice of us versus them.
The world is so inundated with information that it’s proving more difficult to separate credible from non-credible, driving many to mistake the latter for the former, and vice versa. In a culture that values higher quantities of everything, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which “less is more” can become the norm again. Americans are overloaded with information and connected to each other constantly, yet they’re less informed and lonelier than before. But if change is possible, it lies in the hands of individuals themselves, not the government.
Tribalistic fervor has infected large amounts of the populace, and for whatever reason, they are willing participants. Whether it’s desire to belong to something, or drowning in information such that right from wrong is muddied beyond reproach, Americans are shedding their independence in favor of errant partiality. To be sure, humans are not purely objective creatures. But an approach of fairness toward peers and the information they disperse is a tool we possess. That goal cannot be reached, however, by the government or tech giants deciding what’s credible and what isn’t — like some have suggested and others are already doing.
Instead, it is incumbent upon individuals themselves to avoid feeding the fire of fake news by overcoming the effects of information overload and averting the tribalistic vitriol that sustains it. Luckily, all that takes is using a little reason and practicing some curiosity when presented with claims. Reasonable people can disagree on situations and the solutions for them. Unreasonable people pound their fists in fits of rage over the “other” they believe to be injuring them. The former is what a republic such as ours thrives on. The latter is its downfall.
Brad Johnson is an author in Cincinnati, Ohio.
