… In recent years, there has been enormous concern about the time we spend on our web-connected devices and what that might be doing to our brains. But a related psychological shift has gone largely unremarked: the way that, for a certain segment of the population, the news has come to fill up more and more time – and, more subtly, to occupy centre stage in our subjective sense of reality, so that the world of national politics and international crises can feel more important, even more truly real, than the concrete immediacy of our families, neighbourhoods and workplaces. It’s not simply that we spend too many hours glued to screens. It’s that for some of us, at least, they have altered our way of being in the world such that the news is no longer one aspect of the backdrop to our lives, but the main drama. …
By according political news such centrality in our mental landscapes, we may be squeezing out the very things politics was supposed to facilitate, and simultaneously doing injury to democratic politics itself.
To see the damage more clearly, consider what has happened to the “public sphere” – the place where democratic debate is supposed to unfold – in the era of social media. In the dreams of its hippie pioneers, the internet was supposed to expand this sphere massively, creating a new global agora, where people who had previously lacked a voice could participate in the decision-making process, leading to better and fairer decisions, which would garner much wider support. But it is becoming ever clearer that what the internet is really doing is eroding the boundary between the public and private spheres, making measured conversation, let alone consensus, increasingly difficult. CONT.
Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian