The day there was no news
The true cost of becoming informed
🏷️ Categories: History, Attention, Time.
Imagine tuning in to your radio on any given night, when suddenly the newscast catches your attention. The usual. A recap of events, headlines of the day, some hot topic of conversation....
But you hear an unexpected, almost absurd phrase.
“There is no news.”
That's what happened on April 18, 1930 on the BBC at 8:45 pm. With nothing more to say, the announcer announced news silence and let piano music fill the newscast time (BBC News, 2017). Today, this seems unreal, a memory of a slower, less saturated time.
It makes me wonder.
What are the consequences of the current bombardment of information?
Too much noise and not enough signal
Today we live at the opposite pole.
A person consumes 35 GB of information per day (Bohn & Short, 2012). Every minute 241 million emails are sent, 42 million Whatsapps are sent and 500 hours of video are uploaded on YouTube (Statista, 2024). Every year, more than 7 million scientific articles are written (and growing exponentially) (Fire & Guestrin, 2019).
The problem is no longer in finding information, but finding the right information.
Channels broadcast news 24/7 and social networks have a new “urgent update” to attend to every minute. That doesn't mean that more things happen now than 100 years ago, the same things happen, but now everything is at your fingertips.
The idea of a day without news seems ridiculous, unthinkable.
I think of
, a reader of Mental Garden. In the letter in Why are you always out of time, he described today's frenzy this way, “Everything must be optimized, everything must be useful or profitable, and any seemingly ‘empty’ time makes us feel guilty.”Technology has created an environment in which silence has no place.
Distortion of reality
On the day the BBC decided there was “no news,” things did happen (Pirie, 2024).
A British arsenal in India was raided by armed rebels.
A terrible fire devoured a church in Romania.
A typhoon swept through the Philippines.
But none of these events were mentioned by the broadcaster. They were not “important” to the editorial criteria. That act of silence reminds us of something crucial that we often forget: news is not reality, it is a filter of reality. That filter limits what you pay attention to.
And your attention defines how you see the world.
In economics we talk about the concept of “opportunity cost”, which is the cost of choosing one option over another. To choose something is to give up something else, to report one thing takes time away from reporting something else. In this economy, your attention is the bargaining chip that everyone is interested in.
In 1930 the BBC chose not to report.
Today, the situation is different, reporting 24/7, but the result is still the same.
The media select which stories to tell according to economic or political interests. In the end, countless topics are ignored. For example, conflicts in Africa can be ignored if a political scandal in the West gets more clicks and minutes of attention.
This imbalance creates a distorted view of the world.
The media don't tell you what to think, but they tell you what to think about.
It is pure mathematics.
The opportunity cost of being informed is increasing. The day is still 24 hours long, but there is more and more information to choose from. You have to give up more and more topics to get information on just one. Fortunately, today you can read and contrast more information than ever before, even if the work of reflection is still as hard as it was 100 years ago.
If you don't let yourself be overcome by laziness, you can choose your information diet.
One that nourishes you.
Choose to prioritize quality over quantity. Leisurely reflection over accelerated consumption. Raise your standard of quality and decide which topics to devote your attention to. If you do, I assure you that you will not go at the speed of the news and the Internet.
Sometimes, the best headline is to have none at all and stay focused on yesterday.
✍️ Your turn: What are your main sources of information and ideas? I usually opt for scientific articles, books and conferences. I generally only watch news when it is no longer news, i.e. weeks or months later, when there is no more speculation and data on the table.
💭 Quote of the day: “TV news entertains but does not inform, I am saying something much more serious than the deprivation of authentic information. I am saying that we are losing our sense of what it means to be well-informed.” Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death.
See you soon in the next one! 👋
References 📚
BBC News. (2017). «There is no news»: What a change from 1930 to today. URL
Bohn, R. E., y Short, J. E. (2012). Measuring Consumer Information. International Journal Of Communication, 6, 980-1000. URL
Fire, M., & Guestrin, C. (2019). Over-optimization of academic publishing metrics: observing Goodhart’s Law in action. GigaScience, 8(6). URL
Pirie, M. (2024). The day nothing happened — Adam Smith Institute. Adam Smith Institute. URL
Statista (2024a) YouTube: hours of video uploaded every minute 2022 | Statista. URL
Statista (2024b). User-generated internet content per minute 2023 | Statista. URL
How true this is. This reminds me of a visit to Las Vegas. What hit me hardest (and it did feel like being slapped in the face) was that every space available contained an ad for something. Side of vehicles of all kinds, building surfaces, anything. And of course tee shirts with whatever on the front were everywhere. it was crazy!
I worry that this aspect of choice is actually rather dangerous unless people have some inkling of how to make good choices. This is, in part, why we see such a distrust of expertise and why we have so much misinformation floating around. Perhaps, there was more homogeneity in thought when there was less to choose from... which is a rather problematic place to be in--- bc it can result in all kinds of authoritarianism... but it seems that being able to chose can also take us there.