In A Snippet-Driven Society, It's Time For 'Slow News'

On Saturday, I was listening to a roundtable on NPR that was essentially three guests verbally aggregating things they had read instead of providing actual opinions of their own. When asked a question such as "What do you think of the president-elect's behavior this week?", a guest would answer by saying "Well, as X wrote in Slate this week, blah, blah, blah." This is what passes for intellectual expression in 2016. Even on public radio.

We have elected a president who seems to get most of his core political beliefs from other tweets and random pieces he's read in the newstream on his smart phone. Even the best of our political reporting is weighted down in links that point to basic facts that in any rational context wouldn't need to be credited to a third source. Entire pieces are aggregated Frankenstein-style from thirty different sources and the result is reporting that is jammed with facts, but devoid of any context or original thought.

That aggregation-as-reporting migrated over to cable news in the past couple of years and the result is a perplexing mix of tweets as news, op-eds turned into panels and incessant recountings of conventional political wisdom disguised as news. Afraid to put forward an actual opinion, cable news in particular turned to political strategists to do their dirty work. It's cable news aggregation at its most soul-draining. Bring on a guest who has written/tweeted some controversial point and aggregate a response to them. In that way, cable news was able to cover all sorts of random opinions without ever having to take responsibility for any of it.

Post election, national media types have become obsessed with "fake news," and rightfully so. The practice of sites cranking out pieces they know are false just to make some money is loathsome. But fake news is also the inevitable endpoint for a political news complex that is crippled by the cognitive dissonance of a system that seem unable to change. They disapprove of fake news, but spent months letting it on their airwaves for base, cynical reasons. They ask themselves "Why didn't we see the unhappiness in the country?", while at the same time their airwaves are filled with a rotating procession of politically-connected reporters and political types. They bemoan the Right's successful campaign against the media without asking the obvious question: "Why was that campaign so successful? How did our behavior help make this possible?"

All of this comes at a time when it's increasingly difficult to discover new points of views and unorthodox thinking. It's the sad irony of technology that increasing the digital connections between us and the speed we can reach out doesn't correlate with increased clarity. Twenty years into the Internet age and we are a nation of people who have traded conversation and original thinking for an aggregated world that often feels empty and cold.

The only response to the rise of aggregation in our lives is to seek out new opinions. Talk to fresh faces. Assemble your own political thoughts and express them confidently. Be willing to disappoint others. Be brave enough to burn some bridges. Have an opinion of your own and share it. Breath.

And be cautious with your use of social media. Twitter & Facebook are snippet machines, perfectly designed to push a lot of short, random thoughts at you. Often on your phone, which means you are likely seeing the info while you're killing 30 seconds at a traffic light. View everything you see in social media as suspect, or at the very least, lacking in the context that might bring new meaning to that outrage you just read in 20 seconds.

My main goal in 2017 is to bring context to my life. We are living in increasingly troubled times. And the answer to that is not to attempt to changes hearts & minds with some tweets and references to "that piece in Politico." I need to "de-aggregate" my life as much as possible. To spend more time in real life, with real people. To pay less attention to the random outrages that I see on social media. To ask more questions about news stories I read and see if there's context missing that might change the intent of the piece. It's important for me to form my own opinions and demand the same from friends, family and the media.

The "Slow Foods" movement was formed in 1989, and:

Its stated mission was to counter the disappearance of local food traditions and people's dwindling interest in the food they eat and where it comes from.

In the same way, I find a "Slow News" approach to be a very tempting way to live in the coming year. To spend less time concerned with unsettling tweets from our president-elect and more time on the issues I can directly effect. To worry less about some random comment made in the midst of a choreographed TV news panel and more time on the underlying legislation that matters. I'm going to tune out the attempts by certain news outlets to turn the Trump Administration into the ultimate blood-and-circuses ratings bonanza that will make some big media companies very rich. I am going to reward deep reporting and context-driven news pieces with my clicks and my support. I want to know where my news comes from, and why.

There is much more to say about this and that is without even getting into Silicon Valley's culpability in our evolution into an aggregation nation. I'll be writing more about this and other related issues in the coming weeks. But I'd also like to hear from you. Send your thoughts, comments and feedback to me via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. You can also follow me on Twitter at @aysrick.