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I suppose it’s advancing age that makes me start these essays sometimes with a reference to the past, when things were, for better or for worse, undeniably different. But I do want to start this essay with the “when I was young” trope, because I’m writing about something which has changed very substantially since that time: the supply of data about the world, and how we relate to it. I argue that much of modern media is making us ill, and that we should see it as a threat, and should protect ourselves from it.

That may sound a sweeping judgement, but in fact you very often encounter exactly those complaints by ordinary people, and even in the media itself. One popular image is of the “firehose” spewing information at us faster than we can take it in. And I can’t count how many people have complained to me about how “all the news is bad,” and “I can’t bear to watch or listen to the news.” But of course they do. So here are some reflections prompted by that kind of comment.

For a start, it was not always thus. From the arrival of mass literacy in the nineteenth century up to perhaps the 1980s, individuals absorbed relatively limited quantities of information about the world. There were large numbers of print newspapers and magazines, to be sure, but they all cost money and most people read only a few. You’d see the more conscientious spending an hour in the public library from time to time, catching up on the latest events. I often did that myself. The choice of radio and TV stations was limited, and if you missed the news broadcasts, you had to wait for the next one. All of this meant that the volume of data coming anybody’s way was relatively limited. That had a number of practical consequences.

One was that it made you into a passive consumer. It was not possible to avoid the news: you would watch whatever the producer at the BBC thought you needed to know. Parents might find an excuse to talk loudly during some segments that they thought unsuitable for their children, just as they might try to discourage their children from reading certain newspapers or magazines, but censorship at the micro-level (including self-censorship) was actually rather difficult, and it was impossible to avoid learning about things in the world that displeased or might upset you.

Second, it was much more homogeneous than is the case today. Broadly, the major TV and radio channels and the major newspapers covered the same stories, although with obvious differences of emphasis. You could discuss what was going on with most people, with a fair degree of common understanding. The barriers to entry for news organisations, both financial and practical, were high enough that they themselves were relatively few in number. They also tended to be well resourced by the standards of their descendants today.

The result was that, if you read one or two daily newspapers, watched the TV news once a day, listened to news on the radio in the morning, and watched the occasional current affairs documentary (remember them?) you could consider yourself reasonably informed about the world. Obviously, there were limitations. Minority points of view could be harder to find, and not all subjects were covered, especially controversial ones. Likewise, a TV documentary might take an hour to watch (as opposed to a transcript that might take ten minutes to read) and thus the amount and diversity of information that could be consumed by the average person was limited. Nonetheless, in reality  (as opposed to in theory) there is probably less difference on these points today than might be imagined.

The deregulation of broadcasting media in the 1980s the advent of video recording and the subsequent introduction of satellite television, brought about many changes, but here I am concerned primarily with those affecting information. And by “information” I do not imply that the material  was necessarily “knowledge,” that it was accurate, or even that it was useful. In effect, a step-change occurred in the volume of data that was being directed at the consumer. But the amount of time available to process this data was still limited, for obvious reasons, and if the supply increased radically at the same time as capacity to assimilate remained broadly static, then inevitably the quality went down, and the amount of genuinely useful knowledge transmitted in a given time-period actually declined. Anyone forced for professional reasons to put up with 24-hour satellite television in the 1990s would be familiar with the endlessly repetitive news bulletins, the repeated interviews and interviews about interviews, and the endless guests who had nothing to do but speculate in a vacuum about whatever the crisis of the day was, or might become. Satellite television—expensive at the time—lent itself above all to brief, sensational and largely context-free reports which probably misled more than they informed.

But of course it was the coming of the Internet which made the real difference, and opened the floodgates, allowing data to pour into the mind of the average person. The introduction of mobile phones capable of Internet reception also increased the amount of time for which people could be subjected to this data stream. Whereas in the past if you finished your newspaper on the way home from work you had to read a book or stare out of the window, in recent years you could spend hours on your mobile phone absorbing data of every type and quality from all directions. (We recall that in 1984 telescreens in the apartments of the Outer Party could never be turned off. I doubt if Orwell would have believed that one day people would leave them on continually voluntarily.)

Yet it’s generally accepted that people are no better informed, on average, than they were fifty years ago, and that the average quality of the data they receive is lower than it has ever been. Theoretically, we should be living in a golden age of information, where everything we might want to know is only a click away: a delusion that led some idiots to suggest in the early years of the Internet that soon schools and universities would be unnecessary, because everything you might need to know would be easily available.  In reality, it’s not just that there is so much garbage out there (and I really can’t be bothered here to get into the “fake news” argument), it’s also that actually trying to find something reliable to inform yourself with can seem to require the skills of a trained intelligence analyst, these days.

It’s also become, paradoxically, too easy to find what you are looking for: the sheer amount of material available online is such that any hypothesis you can think of is supported, any interpretation you can imagine is already documented somewhere. I often think of the Internet as analogous to Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel, which contains all possible books of a certain size. Most are complete gibberish, but one, somewhere, must contain the truth about the Universe, just as another will refute it, and just as another will refute the refutation. The despair of the librarians in Borges’s Library will be familiar to anyone who has attempted to derive genuinely useful information from the Internet. But of course it’s also true that information has become a commodity: you can buy the truth or the interpretation you want in return for enduring an advertisement or two. Ben Jonson noticed the tendency of capitalism to reduce everything to commerce as early as 1625 with his play The Staple of News. (A “staple” was an early form of monopoly.) In the play, news is sold depending upon what the customer wishes to hear: truly, some artists see a long way into the future.

What we may call the “signal to noise” ratio of data available today has probably never been lower, even while the quantity continues to grow. This problem has even affected traditional news sources, who now publish infinitely more than they used to, but of a markedly lower value. Few people now buy print newspapers, and to download of a PDF of one you generally need a subscription: few people are willing to pay for a large number of those. So in general we consume what used to be print media (much of which has no physical equivalent now anyway) in summary form, through links and RSS feeds. As a result, it’s quite normal to be unable to remember exactly where you came across a particular story. This has the effect of destroying what previously were discrete identities for publications. In the old days, you might buy a newspaper and read it through, perhaps skimming through the sports, financial or lifestyle pages, depending on your interests and how much time you had. Today, it is effectively impossible to recapture that experience, of a wide variety of news and comment brought together in a coherent format that you are used to. In practice, it means picking your way through a dozen different sites in search of something interesting, and frequently bumping up against paywalls, all the time being assailed by advertisements, links and stories that are completely irrelevant.

Take a simple example. For decades I used to buy the Grauniad with my own money, and read nearly all of it. Today, I flick through its RSS feed in search of something worth reading. Like most “news” sites, it projects a constant stream of stories at you, hoping somehow that you will find one of them of interest enough to click on. At 10h00 CET as I am writing this, two hundred separate stories have appeared in the last twenty-four hours alone. It would take me three or four hours of steady application to read them, and some time to decide even if they were worth reading, especially since they are mostly about entertainment, sports (especially women’s football) tourism, other -isms, and “human interest”, mixed with a few rants and and the odd bit of actual news. Anything to attract readers and get clicks and advertising revenue.

In addition, polemic has increasingly replaced the mixture of news and comment that used to characterise the print and broadcast media, and these categories are no longer really separated, anyway. Many sites advertise themselves as being about “news and comment,” though it’s often hard to extract any real information from what is presented. Now it can be interesting to read someone’s opinions on something, provided they have some background in the subject, and what they say leaves you better informed, even if you don’t necessarily agree with the author. That’s what “opinion” used to mean. These days, such is the ease of entry into the public space, and so difficult is it to mark yourself out from others, except by volume and ferocity, that we have seen the rise of the all-purpose polemicist, moving seamlessly from Ukraine to Gaza to Yemen, to domestic US politics to the Chinese economy to some culture wars issue, all on the basis of half an hour’s quick research, often on other polemical sites, together with a certain talent for expressing strong, and even violent opinions.

As you’ll have gathered, this site doesn’t function that way. I try to write about what I know, or what I think I can usefully contribute. I don’t like being shouted at, and I don’t shout at others. But it has to be recognised that shouting at others is in fact a very successful business model. It doesn’t require much effort of research, it doesn’t require any sophisticated skills of construction and expression, and it gets you lots of readers who come to your site in the knowledge that you will be articulating and confirming ideas they already hold, and so they will feel comforted and justified.

The sheer quantity of data —again, let’s not confuse data and information, let alone knowledge—is burying us. Look at your personal inbox and see how much rubbish it contains. Even with sophisticated spam filters quite a lot gets through. Do you remember subscribing to that newsletter? Do you irritably delete the umpteenth marketing email from a gardening site from which you once bought a poor-quality watering can? Do you miss things that are actually important in your inbox among the mass of sludge? And what about your professional life: how many hours a day do you have to spend trying to keep the information flung at you under any sort of control, especially now that you can receive it anywhere you happen to be? I don’t subscribe to any TV channels myself (I hardly watch TV) but I hear all the time complaints from people having to spend a fortune each month for one series they like, somewhere among all the dross they have unwittingly subscribed to.

It didn’t have to be like this. The manic deregulation of television in the 1980s was a deliberate political choice, part of the privatisation and financialisation of everyday life. Those sports events you used to watch for free were taken hostage and sold back to you in the form of subscriptions. It could have been otherwise. Telecommunications systems could have remained government monopolies, accountable to parliaments and publics, rather than cash cows to be sold off to friends of Ministers. The computer scientist and productivity guru Cal Newport recently explained in a podcast how different email could have been, especially in a corporate environment, had it not been introduced by Bill Gates at Microsoft, who wanted a system where he could communicate with anyone in the company instantly, and they with him. The French proto-internet, the Minitel introduced in the 1980s, was free, secure and publicly owned.

I think we have to do something about all this before it buries us, and makes us ill. I’m not talking about censorship, or even the “digital detox” that some favour, where you get off social media for a while. (In fact, I think you should get off social media entirely, unless you can show to yourself that you have an operational need to use it for a defined purpose, but that’s by the way.) No, what I have in mind is a psychological change, the erection of a screen which prevents anything getting to you except that which you positively want and need. As well as evidence that too much time in front of screens of all kinds makes us ill, as well as the documented hormonal effect of repeatedly clicking on links for videos, as well as the stress and irritation of never being able to find what you want, as well as the total crapification of search results so that the first promising hit after a page of advertisements is ten years out of date, there is the simple fact that we have become slaves to technologies which exist primarily to exploit us, and take our money. We need to get back in control.

Easier said than done, you suggest? Well, inevitably, but I believe we have to start thinking in a structured way about how to defend ourselves, and how to actually make use of all this data without being drowned in it, and letting it depress us. The change I have in mind is quite simple: have a default question when information is thrown at you, or when you switch on something that you know will throw information at you: do I need this? I don’t mean “might this be interesting?” “could this possibly be useful some day,?” still less “I’d better look at this because everybody’s talking about it.” I mean literally that you don’t switch on your TV or radio, don’t turn on your computer or don’t click on a link unless you can convince yourself that you will get some kind of benefit thereby. Now this is obviously an extremely austere model, and in practice, once you’ve satisfied these criteria, you will have time and space to satisfy your genuine curiosity for other things. So I watch videos and listen to podcasts on the history of esoteric thought, and I drool over websites devoted to expensive stationery, but that’s a choice, not the result of idly clicking on stuff.

But how do you make these judgements? I suggest two rules, one of selection by subject, the other of selection by type. The first is easier to understand, and I’ll give you an example. I decided some time ago not to follow events in Myanmar, except in the most cursory fashion. I’ve never been to the country, and I doubt if I ever will, now. I don’t know the region particularly well. I have no operational need to know about the fighting there: I’m not going to write about it, and it’s unlikely that anyone will ever seriously want to have my opinion on the subject. So that clears space in my brain for other things. After all, apart from curiosity, and the smug and complacent sense of being “well-informed”, what would I want to follow events in Myanmar for? Likewise, I don’t take much interest in so-called “Artificial Intelligence.” I don’t understand the technology except in the vaguest outline, and I never will. I’m interested in the social ramifications, and in the effects on the academic world, so I will read articles about that side of it, provided they are written by someone who knows what they are talking about.

Which brings us to the second point. Because the barriers to entry are so low, anyone, in principle, can write about anything. I try here, for example, never to write about countries I haven’t visited, or subjects I haven’t had some personal acquaintance with. But that’s just me, and the Intertubes are full of opinion pieces by people who clearly don’t have the remotest clue what they are really talking about. So when you stumble across an article or video about Myanmar which suggests that the war is all a result of a plot by the CIA/the Russians/the Chinese or whoever, look and see who the author is. Is he/she a “staff writer,” a “peace campaigner,” a “writer on global politics,” or some other deadly formula which means they were looking for a subject and found (or were given) this one? My normal rule is not to read or listen to such productions unless it’s evident that the person concerned has at least some detailed background and specialist knowledge. After all, would you trust an article about likely movements in coltan prices and shipping rates by a retired dentist who mostly wrote about rock music and Japanese manga?

The other thing you can do is look at the nature of the article or video, even if the author concerned does actually seem to know something. Imagine for a moment that you are searching for material on Gaza and the first four items that come up are the following:

• An angry article condemning Israeli policy in Gaza and demanding that members of that country’s government be put on trial for war crimes. `

• An angry article defending Israel’s policy in Gaza and calling for the prosecution of critics under laws against racial hatred.

• A long article arguing that it’s all the fault of the British for the Balfour Declaration, the Zionists, the CIA or the Russians, to take attention off their “failure” in Ukraine.

• An article by a regional specialist on the prospects for some kind of peace negotiations.

Of all of those, which would you read? Well, in the first two cases, either you will agree or disagree, and either you will feel a rush of agreement or a rush of anger, neither of which is particularly useful. In the third case, there’s little to be gained by arguing about “fault” in history. It is, precisely, history, and makes no difference now except in arguments that nobody is going to win, so why bother? In any case you’ll probably wind up disagreeing with the author, especially if you know anything about the subject. Don’t read those, and don’t read the last one unless the author has an interesting and novel interpretation you haven’t come across before.

What this does is to clear an enormous amount of space in your brain, and to avoid stressing yourself with unnecessary emotions about things you can’t influence. So once you have decided that what’s going on in Gaza is terrible, which it is, how many more videos and stories do you need to subject yourself to in order to confirm that view? Now if you say to other people “I’m very careful what I watch about Gaza, it makes me needlessly upset,” you may get one of two replies. You may be told “you have to keep yourself informed.” But whereas the announcement of a promising new peace plan is genuinely interesting and probably worth reading about, another video of dead Gazans isn’t going to tell you anything you don’t already know, and is just likely to make you feel angry and helpless. Do you want to feel angry and helpless? Or maybe the response is “I suppose you just don’t care, then?” which is stupid, but is also an indication of our current narcissistic belief that things in the world exist only insofar as we take an interest in them, and for that matter that making ourselves angry and miserable somehow has an effect on reality. But what do we gain, in fact, from being miserable and unhappy about things we cannot alter and are never likely to be able to influence?

So let’s assume that you don’t open a link, watch a video or switch on the TV, unless you are fairly sure that you will learn something, as opposed to being shouted at, emoted at, or have your attention sold to an advertiser. That’s already a major economy in time and emotional labour. But what about other things?

Well, take a look at subscriptions. It’s very easy to sign up to things you never read, and then you have an endless succession of moments when you scroll past or delete things, thinking “I must unsubscribe some time.” But you never do, and so every day it’s more difficult to find the relatively small number of things that are worth reading, and that you intend to find the time for. And of course frequently you miss things in a stream of crud. It’s a good discipline, I find, to look through all of the institutional or commercial emails you receive, and unsubscribe from one, just one, every day, that you hardly ever read. After a week or two, you’ll start to find that your inbox (and we’ll come back to that) starts to shrink provided you delete mails regularly (and we’ll come back to that too.) What this does is to increase the signal to noise ratio, and make the sum total of the information you receive more valuable, on average, than it would otherwise have been. And it may also give you a sense of control you were lacking before, and removes a psychological weight. It’s hard to object to that.

Yes, it’s true that you might miss something useful, yes it’s possible that the newsletter you have been irritably deleting for the last few months finally acquires a good writer, or someone with amusing opinions. But the whole point of this approach is that you only read things by exception. Continuing a subscription on the basis that “something may turn up” is a waste of time.

There’s a whole section of the productivity industry devoted to the concept of “Inbox zero,” but don’t worry, I’m not going to get involved in that. I’ll just observe that I have seen many people panicked, helpless and depressed about an inbox with two thousand mails in it, three quarters of which are unread, hundreds of which they have no idea why they even received. That causes stress and unhappiness, and it’s a sure recipe for actually losing stuff that’s important. I’m far from a guru in these areas but for what it’s worth, here are a few tricks that I’ve adopted over decades of computer use that I find tend to make me less irritable and increase the signal to noise ratio markedly.

First, what do you want in your Inbox anyway? Essentially, you want things you are definitely going to do something about, usually reply to, deal with, or read instantly. Things you will read “when you have a minute,” newsletters you sometimes flick through and advertising for stuff you are never going to buy belong elsewhere. Fine, you say, but how do you get there? The answer is Rules, which as it happens I wrote about last week, but Rules that are automatic, and don’t require you to do anything. To do this, you need a decent email program with a powerful Rules component: I have used Postbox for the Mac for many, many years, mainly because of this. I start with different accounts for different purposes. One is my “serious” Gmail account for personal and professional contacts. One is my Apple account, which is mostly restricted to news and contact with them. Then I have three or four others, including one for buying stuff and subscribing to newsletters, and one for the management of this newsletter, as well as an academic one. This immediately imposes a sorting effect, since I know that I don’t have to look at any of the subordinate accounts more than once a day.

For all these accounts, I then have filters. The result is that, for my Gmail account, only a handful of emails actually arrive in my Inbox every day. The rest are automatically shuttled somewhere else before I see them, and if I have more than ten emails in my Inbox, it means either new senders for whom I haven’t devised a Rule yet, or a sudden rush of important emails. Everything I’ve dealt with gets filed in the appropriate folder, and everything I’m going to deal with later gets copied to Omnifocus, where it’s allocated to a day. Only things where I can’t take or plan action immediately remain in the Inbox. That may seem extreme, but the sense of being in control, of having decided for yourself what you will look at and what you won’t, is worth the few hours involved in creating and maintaining Rules.

But that’s only half of it. Do you have thousands of emails waiting to be read? I have Rules set up which apply to individual reading folders. After a set length of time, papers I haven’t saved, satisfaction enquiries I will never respond to, details of train or plane trips I have already taken, details of past hotel or restaurant reservations, special offers now expired, all simply disappear, whether they have been read or not. Perhaps some useful stuff disappears as well, but my view is that if I haven’t read it after anything between seven to thirty days, then I’m not going to. Better to get rid of it. Not the least of the benefits of this kind of approach is that you see what’s important and what’s not, and what actually needs to be done, as opposed to just what somebody else wants you to do.

Of course, none of this is going to stop people clicking on random links or auto-playing videos one after the other. But try, just as an experiment, thinking that perhaps the overwhelming deluge of information we are subjected to these days could be a benefit rather than a challenge, as long, and only as long, as you take charge of it. After all, someone is going to be in control of your information life, and it might as well be you.

And now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to purge a few folders and unsubscribe from a couple of newsletters.