Imagine there’s a new drug on the market. It promises to make you a better person and the world a better place. Nice! However, the caution reads: likely to be highly addictive. Also, may cause: anxiety, distraction, depression, sense of helplessness, drowsiness and outrage. In addition, users should note: may be totally ineffective in stated aim of making you or world a better place. Recommended prescription: three large doses per day and infinite application at 20- to 30-minute intervals, forever.
That, for me, is the news.
I am a heavy user. The Guardian delivered in the morning. Radio 4 through the day. Working at my computer, my holy trinity are the BBC, theguardian.com and Twitter. That’s where I go after I’ve written a scene, a paragraph, a sentence – sometimes a word. A rat poking the lever, hoping for a treat.
But what is all this news for? Because though I check it four times an hour, I am still essentially an uninformed doofus. I still don’t say “Syriza” or “President Abe” in polite company in case I get the pronunciation wrong.
I guess a great deal of my news consumption is simply disguised distraction. But it’s hard to stop, because news is the popping candy that I can pretend is wholemeal bread. Reading the news, after all, is improving, surely. Keeping up is part of being a Decent Person, ready to hold the government to account and likely to recognise a member of the shadow cabinet if one tries to sell you cocaine in a nightclub.
The good citizen version of the news has all of us, especially the news junkies, walking around like reserve-team secretaries of state. Informed enough that we are ready at any moment to be drafted into the cabinet, our priorities clear for those first 100 days in the Department of Health, Education or the Treasury. My news accumulation is like a kid preparing to go to a football match by putting a replica strip on under his everyday clothes, in case he gets pulled from the crowd and asked to play.
I’d like to take a break from the news. I have just completed work on a novel about Bosnia in the 90s and I have thought so much about intervention, its rights and wrongs, that my head hurts. Maybe it’s not necessary to feel a sense of personal failure that I don’t have a workable solution to Syria. Could I perhaps duck out of the whole thing for a month?
“What if they pass a new law and you get arrested for something you don’t know about?” my daughter asks, rather excited. “What if the world is going to end in two days and you have no idea? What if the third world war breaks out?” We agree that in the case of a new law criminalising actions I habitually perform, third world war or imminent comet impact, a family conference will be held where it is decided whether I should be informed. Or not.
So what is this news I am going to avoid? I reset my homepage. Pull the Guardian, BBC, Slate and Salon from my favourites. What about Twitter? Twitter is news. No Twitter. Suddenly it starts to feel that everything is news. National Rail live departures. Is that news? No. I rarely look at National Rail departures when I’m supposed to be working.
Is sport news? Yes, I have to admit sport is definitely news. It is a gateway drug and the most highly addictive form. Sport is news for people who can’t face the news but want the news on tap.
I start my ban just after transfer deadline day, the most rackety motor of news production. Before I start, I am a little panicky, hoovering up all the information I can.
“What’s the best alternative to potato fries?” Shit – I need to click on that! “Cassava or gram flour?” Phew. Noted. Logged.
The very last headlines I see before going under are about the Jordanian pilot burned to death by Isis. I feel immediate relief that I won’t have to read the paper in the morning. No longer trying to figure out, as we’ve all had to recently, what’s prurient, what’s necessary, what bears witness to horror but doesn’t somehow revere the brutality.
Once I start, the tent poles of my day dissolve. If it’s not to listen to World at One, why have lunch at one? I have it, thrillingly, at 12.45. I listen to the British History podcast. Over a hundred editions in, I am still deep in the Dark Ages. There are at least three hour-long episodes on King Offa of Mercia alone. I am not totally uninterested in Anglo-Saxon history. At least I wasn’t until I started listening to an in-depth discussion of it. What kind of sick substitute for current affairs is this?
Without the news sites to check, I am at a loss during breaks from work. I discover that what I do, mostly, most days, is not in fact work, but keep up to speed with world events. It is both a job and a hobby. Maybe, if I counted the hours, it is my main job and hobby?
It’s probably important that someone is reading all the horrible things in the world, but does that need to be me?
I think about all the strands I’ve left hanging. Syriza: how will the negotiations play out with the European Central Bank? Podemos. The TV election debates – will they happen? Will Fulham make the playoffs? Will Man Utd ever play a good game? Also: Syria. Isis. Etc.
I feel a strong news-hunger for these hanging threads. I am full of curiosity, fear of missing out. I find myself reading week-old newspapers. Editions of the New York Review of Books, which normally stack up round my office like a rim of frozen slush, are finally getting a look in. I click hopefully at things that feel like news. Anything interesting happening on National Rail live departures today? When I wonder if Isis might have taken Turkey I feel that surely, if it had, this would have retail repercussions that would be evident on Amazon – wouldn’t it?
But slowly, I notice I feel slightly happier. I am not carrying around so much stuff. On a work morning, I open my emails, then, when they’re done, I have no news to check. No argument about Charlie Hebdo with myself or someone else running round my head. No exhortation to get the French attack into perspective compared to Nigeria. No consequent moral duty to read a good deal on the situation in Nigeria. No attempt to then put “things” into perspective, to formulate a theory of liberalism or intervention or anything that stands up in relation to all circumstances. No conceptualisation of an overall principle to which I can sign up.
My engagement with the news, like a lot of people’s, is on the whole a mess. It’s all about my position. Occasionally a spike of true connection with the victims of history will come through, but those moments tend to lead nowhere. Maybe a charitable donation. Maybe a mini speech to someone I know (subtext: I really care about this, do you?). Maybe, once in a decade, I will go on a march or write a letter to someone. But usually not.
It feels liberating to let all that go. But the question remains: does that freedom come at a cost? Does it matter that I don’t know what is happening in Syria? I can’t believe it doesn’t. Even if I am powerless to do anything, I feel at some level that the guilt itself is important. That it’s the debt we owe the world, to feel bad about it.
The newspapers I miss most are at the weekends. But what a strange compendium they are, now that I’m away from them. The mix of dreadful events and recipes, screams of rage and pain and sweet songs of capitalist quietude. The first Sundays, with no fat, eggy political story to consume with my toast, I am starting to make up my own Westminster news. Something something, shadow cabinet ordered to mimic George Osborne’s successful haircut. A leaked Tory election memo revealing use of canvass-drones to beam virtual Philip Hammonds to doorsteps across the land. People think Miliband is broccoli, but Cameron is asparagus. They don’t like broccoli but find asparagus alienating. Clegg is an artichoke. Alan Johnson is the dream potato.
That has always been my favourite kind of news: tribal political reporting. A poll rating. Secondary material: news derivatives. Apparently serious, but in fact involving the death of no one. Enormous political embarrassments for the right. My happiest ever news period was certainly the Major administration. That was when I really “got into” the news – the time of cash-for questions, arms to Iraq, Jonathan Aitken picking up the trusty sword of truth and swiftly cutting both his legs off with it.
Tory pain is in the same bracket of news as transfer speculation. Pre-premier league fixture chatter: how Phil Jones reckons Man Utd need a big performance at this point in the season. (They never say, do they, that this is probably the week the team can probably kick back a bit – an easier one, overall, to be honest.)
If the Saturday and Sunday papers, heavy on my lap in bed, are the news I miss most, Twitter is the one I miss least – the Hamster Wheel, the Outrage-e-sizer. It’s what you click to experience not your 10 minutes of hate but a multi-directional fume of strong feelings. It can be a little rousing to sniff, I admit, like walking into a gym after a very aggressive spin session. But it doesn’t leave me feeling ennobled. Occasionally better informed, I guess. Certainly with more perspectives, more awareness. But how aware can one person be? Do all the conflicting perspectives come at a cost? If you bristle with a potentially infinite number of contrasting views, are you diminishing something in yourself?
Nassim Taleb, the intellectual and author of Black Swan, says in his earlier book Fooled by Randomness that we should favour information “that is stripped of meaningless but diverting clutter”. That most news is “noise”, when we need the clear signal. I think about this with satisfaction on the tube as I self righteously refuse a free copy of the London Evening Standard. Instead, I play Lux DLX, an App Store version of the board game Risk, and pass my stop, redeploying my imaginary armies around the globe.
The free papers are not difficult to forego. Their headlines always seem to be selling something too hard. Soon there will be no headlines on the front of my Metro, only trails: “What this senior politician announced next will AMAZE you.”
Now and then, news of the outside world does make it through to me
Yet the self-denying element of looking away from headlines on public transport feels weird. Surely we’re programmed to soak up as much information as we can? Hard wired to be constantly on the look-out for danger – wisps of smoke on the savannah’s horizon. But now there are news organisations channelling us nothing but smoke plumes from around the world, 24/7, and we react by getting overly scared – of Isis, of Ebola, of everything.
Now and then, news of the outside world does make it through to me. In a meeting, someone says something about an HSBC scandal. That night I hurry home to check in with my family. I worry that for the first time in my entire life a national news story has had a direct impact on me personally, and it’s during the only month I have ever stopped reading the papers. HSBC is folding and I am about to lose our house. That would be very much one up for the news.
But no. They won’t give me any details, but this is not a Nick Leeson-style story of imminent collapse, I’m told. The same evening I have an almost overwhelming desire to watch a match between Liverpool and Crystal Palace, the outcome of which I care about not at all.
I tell my son that it’s not really news, because I don’t care. He says, “C’mon, this is the bit where you can write about your hardest moment.” So Syriza, Syria? Yeah, I’m curious. But two teams I don’t follow in the now somewhat devalued FA cup? That, it turns out, I need.
The other stuff, I am enjoying not knowing. In terms of the informed citizenry thing? Well, at this point in my life, is there any chance I will change my essential views? I’ve developed a herd-immunity theory of the news: it is probably important someone is reading about all the horrible and boring things in the world. But does that need to be me? I know how I will vote. I’m signed up to my pathetic monthly direct debits to charities and campaigning organisations. I have built a confirmation bias so strongly into my own fabric that it’s hard to imagine a fact that could wonk me. At some level, the news has become a vast apparatus for continually proving me right in my pre-existing prejudices about the world.
What if news is not the solution but the problem? Under authoritarian regimes, manipulation of the news is a tool governments use to massage public support. But isn’t that the case in democracies, too? The Gulf of Tonkin, anti-German hysteria before the first world war, Eden’s support for Suez from the Times and the newsreels – these were all democratic governments priming the public with forms of propaganda.
Without the persuasion of the public, via the media, that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat, could there have been an Iraq invasion? On the eve of the war, it was supported by a majority of the American public – only 27% were opposed to military action. Even in the UK, more people supported than opposed military action (but with the proviso of a UN resolution and evidence of weapons of mass destruction). Given this, will there ever be a moment when the news is good enough, true enough? Isn’t it time to give up on the whole lousy edifice?
The answer, I have always thought, is more news, better news, the killer fact. But in the lead up to the 2003 invasion, I had read so much about Iraq that just saying “no” – the simple, correct, reaction – seemed too gross, too unsubtle a position. I had become a balanced newspaper editorial and missed the big picture.
By the end of my month, I am a news hermit, and slightly anxious about coming out of my cave. What will I find? Will it all be men in jump-suits in driverless-cars with egg-shaped briefcases? Has Italy evolved back into Abyssinia? I email a friendly writer who has written about the benefits of cutting down on outside input, the advantages of withdrawal and solitude. But not only has she given up news for Lent, she has also given up talking to people altogether. Maybe that’s the way the news ban goes: first the updates, then Gogglebox, then all human interaction?
It is sport that tugs me back in to “current affairs”. First I see Fulham live, then Match of the Day, then the League Cup (Capital One Cup) final, and then I crumble and ask for a full briefing on what I’ve missed. HSBC, Straw and Rifkind, the girls who ran off to Syria, Putin and the assassination, Ukraine, Syriza, and the election, all still hanging. A month out, a morning to catch up.
How much of my no-news life am I likely to stick to? It’s all very well to experiment with something odd like banning yourself from the news or drinking small amounts of your own urine for a month, but longer term there’s a danger of coming across like some kind of self-dramatising oddball. Maybe I should junk the whole experiment?
The first Evening Standard I pick up on the train announces, “Moment Bike Boy Is Knifed In The Road”. What is that but an invitation to a snuff photo, a red circle around the moment of maximum horror? What’s coming up tomorrow – Most Horrible Scene Known to Humanity: Picture? I will keep up, I think, a little of my news purdah – a little less Twitter, a lot less of the free papers.
In Fooled by Randomness Taleb also says we should filter out the distractingly new, looking only for the historically significant. But he also mentions that he himself only cares to read “upscale social gossip” in Tatler and Vanity Fair. I would surmise from this that he is perhaps a leading intellectual but also something of a status-obsessed boob. But maybe that’s what’s so infuriating about the news. That in the end what you read and watch is just a reflection of what you’re interested in and who you are, and that’s quite difficult to escape
• Jesse Armstrong’s novel Love, Sex & Other Foreign Policy Goals is published on 2 April by Jonathan Cape at £12.99. To order a copy for £10.39 with free UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.
Jesse Armstrong will be joining Irvine Welsh at a Guardian Live event on 21 April at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London. Guardian Live is our series of debates, interviews and festivals exclusively for Guardian Members – find out more about Membership and how to sign up.