Recently, I read an article[1] on why news is bad for you. Rolf Dobelli has made some very interesting points, but I found his comparison of news and food particularly intriguing. He says, “Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food”.
Low barrier to entry
The facebook news feed, which a lot of us consume every day and some of us multiple times a day is like chicken nuggets for the brain. Every time you open facebook, you are never intending to spend a lot of time on it, just like you seldom plan to have chicken nuggets as a whole meal. Facebook has invested a lot to make the news feed extremely fast and lightweight and by keeping you always signed in its always just a ‘⌘ + T + f’ away. Similarly McDonalds had invented the assembly line of burgers in order to reduce the user wait time, and with a McDonalds in every neighborhood it was always a ‘quick bite’ away.
Easy to consume
Without any barriers, you enter into a world of short snippets of information which are easy for the brain to process. I just opened my newsfeed and I have someones baby pictures, a good night status update, a check in, a blurry instagram photo, a philosophical life message, some viral internet videos, a few links and of course pictures of food. All this information is extremely easy to digest and I’m not even sure what my brain was doing when I was scrolling through this list. None of this information took even a minute, scrap that even 10 seconds to process. I saw it, I put it in memory, I never thought about it and moved on. Fast food thrives on the fact that it is easy to eat. You don’t require any crockery or cutlery and its packed very conveniently as finger food. Just unwrap it and start eating it in while walking, while waiting for the bus or even while driving your car. And just like the brain doesn’t have to work hard to consume the facebook newsfeed, the body doesn’t have to work hard in order to digest the carb rich fast food. Since the body doesn’t have to burn calories to digest fast food and it has a very high energy density, it often results in added pounds. There are some ongoing researches about the effect newsfeed has on the brain, but none of it is conclusive. Hopefully it doesn’t affect our brain in the same way fast food affects our body.
No surprises
When you go to a McDonalds, you know exactly what you are going to get there and most of the times you get the same thing there. You are never surprised by the menu, never surprised by the taste and never really amazed or disappointed. Facebook is slightly better in this case since it does have new content. It is the new content which takes you there in the first place, but you seldom get anything surprising or amazing there. I don’t remember the last time I felt like something on my news feed made my day or I found something which was of great value to me. Does this mean that I don’t connect with the people I have friended on Facebook? Not really. I have often had very engaging conversations with a lot of them in person. Of course some of my friends on facebook are merely acquaintances, but the real problem is that facebook makes it easy and encourages sharing of things which are not necessarily interesting. This frictionless sharing is actually what is responsible for most of the new content on facebook and is also often uninteresting. I myself have been guilty of sharing things in such a way at times, but that seemed to be the etiquette on fb.
How you feel after it
Even though I remember feeling fairly excited about the prospect of having a Zinger burger, I don’t remember feeling great after. I felt full and back when I was in hostel during high school thats what mattered the most. I sometimes felt satisfied but often I felt overfull or nauseous. And after having fast food once a week for 2 years, I gained a lot and on hindsight realized that I should have never made fast food a habit. When it comes to facebook I don’t actually know what I feel after spending some time on the newsfeed. I don’t feel happy, I don’t feel satisfied, I don’t feel sad, the closest thing I can think of is feeling anxious. In order to validate my theory I asked a few other people on how they felt after a session on facebook and the most common answer was that they didn’t know. I then changed the question to ask them specific questions about whether they felt happy or sad or anxious but again most of the people didn’t attach any particular emotion to it. While most people didn’t know, one of my friends said that he felt cluttered, which I found myself agreeing to as well. I decided to make a conscious effort to not go to the newsfeed, and even though it was really hard to change my habits at first I found myself not having the urge at all after a few days of control. More than that I realized that I was not missing out on anything.[2] I found myself being less cluttered, less anxious and much more productive.
Trends
Both products were brilliant inventions when they came out, both were hard problems, and both were born out of good intentions. But the global trends for both are similar. The west has started to understand the repercussions of both and the east has just started to peak in adoption. If you look at a McDonalds in a big city in america and a McDonalds in Asia, the difference is apparent. The McDonalds in San Francisco is run down and predominantly a place where people who can barely afford more expensive food go. In contrast, the McDonalds in Delhi is in a much better state and a place where the middle and the upper middle class goes, often for family outings. In America, people have started understanding the effects fast food has on health, but in India it is still a novelty for many people. Similarly while facebook has started to lose its “cool” factor amongst the people in San Francisco and America’s younger generation, its still a cool concept amongst a lot of people in Asia. The next 20 years will tell us what happens to the newsfeed in its current form, and whether it actually has any detrimental effects on the brain but I certainly hope not. It would be terrible if medical bodies urge the government to tax information overload, just like they are campaigning to introduce a soda tax.
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli
[2] I did not stop using facebook completely. I still receive and reply to messages and event invitations via mobile push notifs but have just stopped checking the newsfeed.
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