Surviving The Modern News Cycle

Earlier this week I saw a story about a cheerleader for the New Orleans Saints getting fired for posting a picture of her in a one-piece on her personal Instagram. This of course violated the team’s policy, which includes such ludicrous notions as: Cheerleaders cannot follow coaches or Saints players on any kind of social media, post pictures of them “semi-nude” or in lingerie, post pictures of themselves in Saints gear, etc. Now if your immediate response to this is “wow it sounds like the NFL literally just wants to control cheerleaders and use their body as official NFL property without any regard to their autonomy as women,” then you are right on the money. Luckily this cheerleader is fighting back and attempting to sue the NFL for its sexist rules and regulations, but it doesn’t change the frequency with which stories like this pop up, showing pieces of systematic corruption across the board and making a lot of people question why they do anything. So in this write-up I wanted to try something a bit different. I wanted to share some of my experiences dealing with the oppressively negative news and maybe start a dialogue of how you personally cope with being surrounded by bad press.

Major Media outlets thrive on tragedy and controversy, and while in a perfect world this wouldn’t be the worst thing, when you take into account how much bad happens on any given day, it becomes a never ending cycle of depressing stories. News articles popping up on our phones about satellites that may fall on us, right-wing conservatives using twitter to bash the young victims of a school shooting, another natural disaster in a foreign country that will be forgotten about in a day, and this can all be in the span of an hour. As we have become more desensitized to the bad, the coverage of the bad has just ramped up more and more, creating the illusion that the world is always one bad day from collapsing on itself. It can all seem inescapable and hopeless, so how can we continue to have faith in the world when all we see of it is the ugly? The answer is both easy and complex at the same time; just as media companies form their own bubbles that consist of all the darker happenings of the world, we have to create the kind of environment around ourselves that we want to see in the world.

Back when I was in school and cared about learning things, we struck a chord in one of my Hinduism classes that really resonated with me. Simply put we talked about the idea that the world as we know it isn’t actually the world, but rather just our perception of the world. So when our daily lives are filled with news of shootings and economic crises, that in turn becomes anxiety that we feel for just being alive in this time. Admittedly this isn’t the hardest concept to wrap your head around, but it feels as though there are a shocking amount of people who underestimate the effect that the media they consume influences them. This goes past referencing your favorite moment in Scandal or sharing your the latest shitpost and extends to the kinds of friends you follow on Facebook and what ads you let come up on your feed vs the ones you choose to hide. Most of you reading this, and most people that those reading this are friends with, are fully immersed in the digital age. Information is relayed in real time from anywhere in the world and we have the capacity to be as informed or misinformed as we choose. Herein lies a problem I want to help us address: exercise your right of choice in this digital age. Understand that you have the capacity to shape your digital landscape, and by extension your world, into something that can help ease the anxiety of the modern news cycle.

Now, I’m not Banksy. I have no intention of preaching that we are tied to technology in an unhealthy way, because honestly that has always been the case. Human history is defined by its technology, from bow and arrows to cars that can drive itself, so 2018 is not that different in the grand scheme of things. What is different, or what should be different, is our ability to curate how we incorporate the good and bad of that tech into our lives. For example, my own personal Facebook timeline consists of articles about social justice and reform, anime memes, and random polls from a polling group that I joined just because distractions are fun. It all seems like a mess but it is a mess that I purposefully made so that I could feel like I am being productive whenever I scroll Facebook. I always want to be aware of injustices in the world because I am a Black man and can’t fool myself into thinking I am wholly accepted in America, but on a less dramatic note I also need to see funny things related to anime because that always puts me in a good mood. It’s a small detail and a delicate balance, one that a lot of people can find without meaning to, but it is vital to keep yourself sane.

What I am advocating for isn’t a kind of internet reform or for you to carefully analyze everything you consume online, but rather to purge the extremes of the world from your view in cases where it isn’t helpful for you to be exposed to. There are only so many videos of unarmed POC getting shot that I can watch before it begins to actually make me feel physically ill, and many of us just endure that illness because it is all we know. This is another lie fed to us by big news outlets to create a need for tragedy, despair, and drama in everything we take in. They can make you think things like peace and positivity are boring and not worth pursuing simply through their practice of feeding consumers the opposite. So don’t let big companies have complete control over the stories you read and the way you experience events in the world. Realize that you have the most control of what you consume online at any given moment and utilize that to its fullest. Block the Facebook pages you followed 6 years ago that now just spit out garbage memes or racist propaganda, Limit the amount of carnage you have to witness on a daily basis so you don’t get nightmares, and if following a page dedicated to pugs makes you happy, then follow the hell out of that page.

In conclusion, now more than ever we are being forced to examine our world in more dramatic, serious, and potentially harmful ways, but that is not all the world is. You can and should control what you consume so that you aren’t at the mercy of whatever company is trying to make you see that the world is on fire. The reality is, the world has always been on fire, things have always been terrible somewhere and always will be terrible somewhere. Our jobs, as a generation that hopefully aspires to change the status quo, is to leave open a pathway to positivity in our lives, in any way we can. Surround yourself with the information you want to see and mold your Social Media lexicon to reflect the kind of person that you want to be. It is easy to see the end of the world, but it is infinitely harder to stop and smell the roses.