Why matters more than what
I started the year coming clean about just how far my news habits had diverged from my values. At first I disconnected from the world outside my own head and my own home on purpose. I had a lot going on, as they say. That attempt at mental cloistering went from just checking the headlines to just checking out. It got less intentional and more habitual as time went on, but the effect was the same. I was less invested in the civic health of where I live. That's not something I want.
We watch, read, and listen to the news the same way we consume countless things we need but can get too much of: food, diversion, advice, vintage fabric—pick your thing. It's a tangled mix of habit, emotion, desire, and values that drives us to consume.
Most of the people who read this newsletter aren't particularly satisfied with the news they're taking in, especially national news. If we're honest with ourselves, it's our whole information diet that could use an overhaul. But short of cutting the supply, which might be an answer but not the only one, it's hard to know how to curate our way to something better.
The first step might be to better understand what drives us to scroll, click, watch, and listen. This week my students and I are keeping close track of our news and information-seeking habits for one 24-hour period. I encourage you to join our experiment.
Social scientists love this diary approach to help them measure all manner of behavior. A study I read in 2015 about a Google-funded experiment asked people every few minutes what information they needed and was one of the inspirations for Outlier's design.
Our information habits diary is lower-tech. The model I found most helpful here is a food diary. Chances are you'll be advised to keep a food diary if you're trying to lose weight, be more mindful about what you put in your body, or figure out what might be causing stomachaches or allergies.
It's worth trying to do the same thing with information, but with one big difference. Most food diaries prioritize the what and the when of consumption. Almost none of them ask you to write down why you're eating. The assumption might be that we eat when we're hungry. But as we all know, and Pete Wells, the former restaurant critic for the NY Times, summarized in a recent piece, "There is bored hunger, sad hunger, anxious hunger and (my specialty) hunger in the service of procrastination."
The information diary I'm encouraging us to do prioritizes the why. I can easily predict which information source I'm most likely to go to for a quick hit when I first sit down at my desk (it's TMZ; I will not lie to you). What I need to think about harder is why I'm checking in so methodically on the antics of minor celebrities I'm not actually that interested in. Is need or interest driving a particular Google search or a click-through from a newsletter? Is obligation or a desire for connection leading me to my daily browse of the Philadelphia Inquirer's homepage? Can I stop kidding myself that I'm going to New York Magazine for succinct but explanatory reporting on politics and admit I just want to self-soothe with product reviews of anti-aging moisturizers? Let's interrogate!
If we better understand the deeper needs we're trying to fill with our information seeking we're more likely to find sources that actually fill those needs. We're likely to save ourselves some time and some energy and feel more in control of our attention and our effort. At least, that's the goal. Let's see if it works!
Make a copy of this log, or copy it into a notebook and keep track of your information-seeking for a full 24 hours. You should record when you tune in to the news, when you go looking for information, or when you're spending time with anything you use as a hybrid of information and entertainment (scrolling, for example, or maybe sports or political podcasts or even product reviews). Don't record anything that is purely entertainment. Do your best to discern what is driving your behavior. If you're unsure, use the notes section of the log liberally. Perhaps those notes will help you understand things when you can look at your entire day as a whole.
I encourage you to send me your logs or your insights. If you've done something like this before, tell me about it. Or, if you're satisfied with your information diet, please share your secrets with us. I'll report back on what my students and I learned in a few weeks. We'll start crafting strategies and developing tools based on what we learn.
Reading recommendations
Fairly far down the page of the search results produced by my "benefits of food journals" Google query was an essay by Wendell Berry called The Pleasures of Eating first published in 1990. It caught my attention because I heard of Berry for the first time a week ago when his book Jayber Crow was being raved about on the What Should I Read Next podcast. The essay is a convincing argument for wresting control of our consumption and pleasure away from producers who just want to commodify it and us. About eating, he writes, "In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend." I appreciate it more already.
If I'm honest about a personal consumption pattern I don't really understand, it would be my fascination with Arctic exploration. I'll snarf down a story about almost any trip or trek in that region even though I like neither the cold nor an expansionist ethos. Hampton Sides’ The Wide Wide Sea scratched the arctic itch with the added benefit of being skeptical about the entire idea of discovery. The book is a re-examination of the legacy of British explorer James Cook through a captivating reconstruction of his final voyage. Cook was killed by Native Hawaiians in 1779 after he and his crew very much overstayed their welcome on the island. He has been lionized and then vilified since. Sides does neither. He is a great writer, and his transparency about the limitations of his attempts to piece together meaning from the historical record feels like such an act of respect toward his readers.
Good luck tracking your information habits, and until next week, take care of yourself.