Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made it difficult to focus on anything else. Images of people living below ground to escape missile strikes, families trekking across borders, crying children — they are embedded in my mind. We are rightfully awed by the Ukrainian people’s resolve in the face of an unprovoked attack, a kind of resolve we see people all over the world have shown in the face of violence.
That human spirit is the reason I feel responsible not just for being informed but also for witnessing. It is easy to look away when the conflict feels remote, but bearing witness is the responsibility of being a citizen of a global superpower. I am also part of a community of people marked by others’ willful forgetting about the price we had to pay to win human dignity. That makes witnessing urgent. I do not want to do to others what is routinely done to us. I do not want to be the person who deals with human cruelty by ignoring it.
The desire to be informed witnesses leads some of us to “doomscrolling” — obsessively checking media feeds for the latest update. I am no exception. I recently found myself on my phone at 3 a.m. refreshing news feeds.
“Doomscrolling” is a new phenomenon, not just a new word for old behavior.Something has happened to make us obsessed with negative news. And research on doomscrolling suggests that this shift in the way we consume information is not ideologically dependent. People on all points of the spectrum from liberal to conservative are prone to doomscrolling. To me, the prime suspect is scale.
We have more information at our fingertips than ever before, and the scale is larger than our individual and collective capacity for sustained attention. How do we manage scale when the information at hand is both so plentiful and urgent? My colleagues often talk about media diets, or the mix of information sources we can reasonably take in. The word “diet” has a lot of negative connotations — deprivation, self-denial, exclusion and penance. But it might be useful to think about variety. When a major information event happens, it is worth checking your diet against other informed people’s.
When I asked my colleagues at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill what they are paying attention to, there was a clear preference for legacy media. There are few substitutes for the systematic information-gathering that media institutions provide. Almost everyone named big sources like The New York Times, The Associated Press and the BBC. Additionally, The Kyiv Independent joins the list for providing local coverage in English. Experts say that in fast-moving events like armed conflicts or mass shootings, institutional media still has the edge.
But as we have learned, institutional media isn’t infallible. Information-dense moments are full of conflicts between worldviews, perspectives and ideological motivations. To counter that, I also rely on media organizations that aggregate news but also report on the state of media. The Nieman Journalism Lab, The Independent and The Editorial Board have been regulars for me over the past week. On a fellow doomscroller’s recommendation I am following the Media Manipulation Casebook, which tracks content removal in Russia and Ukraine. Organizations like these are window frames for information flows. They provide the scope of an information event. Still, every frame leaves something out of the picture. That is where social media is useful, with several caveats.
Twitter has taken the mantle as a single-stop aggregator of media from below — regular people, analysts, and independent writers and researchers can be found in one place. Talking Points Memo’s editor, Josh Marshall, compiled a list of Twitter accounts to follow for diverse perspectives on Ukraine and Russia. The list adds perspective on how the invasion is framed. I have developed a new appreciation for other platforms during the Ukrainian invasion. TikTok users are making first-person content that diversifies my information sources.
Of course, social media is plagued by disinformation and misinformation, in the form of organized campaigns, viral rumors and pure lying. This week Facebook and Google blocked Russian state media from running ads for the first time, demonstrating how easy it is to manipulate that information environment. They also demonstrate the extent to which social media platforms can disrupt organized disinformation campaigns — which could lead one to wonder why they are reluctant to use that power when the stakes are as high as election malfeasance.
Another way to look at information sources is to focus on genre, rather than platform. Newsletters are a powerful entry into the information ecosystem. My theory is that newsletters are an evolution of a very old genre: the new iteration of pamphlets. Political pamphlets are hundreds of years old. They are somewhere between “objective” journalism and polemic. They often present deep explorations of topics and explicitly unsettled arguments. Good newsletters during information events put those window frames up for debate. They are systematic in their analysis of the event but also think critically about the sources that shape the analysis.The historian Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter is a good example.
A good media diet is about more than diversity of sources. It is also about information with different purposes. Investigative journalism takes time and resources. Social media shrinks time and resources but can respond quickly. Newsletters give context and help us make meaning of information events. We cannot parse everything. The answer to the problems created by scale is to acknowledge that we are not infinitely deep containers that can take on as much water as information demands. We must witness, but we must remember that we have limits.
If you want to share your thoughts, please email [email protected].
Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow.
