From The Editor’s Desk: The Ambience of Information

After several months of hemming and hawing, last week I finally mustered the will to delete X, formerly known as Twitter, from my phone. While for some Twitter is a social media afterthought, the app more often than not claimed the most hours on my weekly screen time reports. 

I’ve been asked whether I plan to switch over to BlueSky or Threads but — keeping in mind it’s only been about a week — I’m resolved to bid farewell to short-form social networking forever. The extent of my former addiction has become clearer since jettisoning the app.

I decided to leave a blank space on my home screen where the app was, and now, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, I find myself going to tap the now empty space several times a day. That act has proven to be constructive, often evoking the realization I don’t need to be on my phone. 

In Twitter’s wake, I’ve found I’m reading more articles than I was before. Instead of being inundated with not just the most recent news but also the corresponding thoughts and opinions of my 150 closest friends, this slower mode of news consumption better allows for the gradual processing of information. I find myself coming to my own conclusions instead of adopting an amalgamation of three or four served up by the algorithm.

Accordingly, I’ve been spending a lot of the time I might have spent scrolling Twitter thinking about media and how the different modes through which we receive information affect the way it’s perceived. 

So much of my day-to-day life pertains to news and news media. Beyond being a part of the team which produces The Phoenix every week, I read several articles every day, receive a number of daily newsletters to my inbox and accrue seemingly-endless push notifications from the number of outlets I’ve let invade my lock screen.

Increasingly, obsessive news consumers are an aberration from the mean. The share of U.S. adults who say they closely follow the news fell from 52% in October 2018 to just 38% in August 2022, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Despite this drop in demand, it feels like there’s a larger supply of news than ever within an increasingly-fragmented media environment.

Social media has democratized news delivery, allowing for individual posters to sometimes have greater reach than legacy news outlets. As digital sources become more ingrained within information diets — 86% of Americans told Pew they at least sometimes get news from a smartphone, computer or tablet — our collective perception has become less coherent than ever before. 

Much has been written on the effect of social media echo chambers and their contributions to political division, but what interests me more are the ways we’re impacted by the individualization of information. Beyond algorithms reflecting one’s worldview, the information we come across now is incidental — interspersed between memes and photo dumps. It’s not that people are less informed, but that they’re informed in individually distinctive ways.

Instead of seeking out news, we’re brushed by incidental information, something Nathan Heller, writing in The New Yorker, termed “the ambience of information.” There’s no longer a universal image of the world presented nightly on network television. Instead there’s an amalgamation of millions of individualized worldviews.

In one sense this is a good thing, as no two people ever perceive their surroundings in exactly the same way. Perhaps this fragmentation is a better reflection of the world than what preceded it.

But it presents serious challenges as well.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the dangers of disjointed news consumption came to the fore, as health agencies struggled to contend with the array of conflicting information pervading social platforms. 

A functioning society is dependent on a — mostly — agreed upon reality. I’ve been trying to think about how we can get back to a single reality, and how our work at The Phoenix can contribute to this effort. Unfortunately, I fear it may be too late. 

While some may be reconsidering the specificities of their social media habits, it’s unlikely we’ll all cast aside our accounts and return to brick-and-mortar news mediums. What we can do as avid news consumers is be more conscious of the information we’re receiving, how we’re receiving it and how a source may be influencing the conclusions we draw.