⌾Curio #39 - Michael Luo, Hoop Dreams, Shèna
Although summer doesn’t technically begin in the US until the solstice (June 20), the muggy, jungle heat has started to arrive. The air smells and feels different. It has an unmistakable and moist heaviness to it.
I’ve dusted off my large and unwieldy AC unit, yellow with age, that I inherited from the girl who used to live in my room. It’s one of those floor units with wheels on the bottom and a plastic tube that gets placed in the window. It blasts cool air, creating a roar of white noise that erases the familiar sounds of the street below. Sometimes I’ll stand over the unit with my t-shirt lifted up so the chilly air hits me directly on the chest, making my t-shirt puff up and billow.
Over the past few months, I’ve become used to being perched at my desk with an open window next to me, enabling the noises, smells and sights of the outside world to drift in. Turning on the air conditioning abruptly cuts the sound off, like sitting on the mute button while watching a movie. Life goes on as usual, but now all the action — the guys who do wheelies on their motorbikes, the Puerto Rican men who sit on plastic chairs and gesticulate wildly, the enormous woman who berates her tiny yappy dog, the ice cream truck meandering around the block, the couple having a loud argument — occurs in silence.
Claude Monet - The Cliff Walk at Pourville (1882)
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Welcome back to Curio, the newsletter for curious minds seeking an escape from the noise of the news cycle. I hope you’re staying well.
Until next time,
Oli
Michael Luo’s Quest for Slower, Better News
In 2019, the editor of the New Yorker website, Michael Luo, wrote a piece called ‘The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News’. In it, he argues the current way we absorb news is both exhausting and counterproductive.
It used to be the case that most people’s relationship to current affairs would be to read the newspaper over breakfast or on the way to work and then watch half an hour of news at night on the television. And that would be it. The rest of the day’s mental energy would be spent on other things. Now, the news is a constant onslaught, distractingly prodding us throughout the day on our computers and phones.
Luo believes this is actually making people less informed than they used to be. Sure, everyone knows things faster, but the understanding is often superficial (e.g. clickbait, hot takes on Instagram or reading only the headline on a news website or Twitter) and filtered through algorithms and our particular ideological echo chambers. We’re less likely to encounter depth, sophistication or nuance. Luo argues that this is bad for us as informed citizens and bad for democracy.
I think Luo is on to something. In fact, part of the reason I started Curio was as a reaction to the constant barrage of news. I needed a break.
Luo believes “the current system for delivering news online is broken.”
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Some key excerpts of Luo’s piece are below:
Usually, in the morning, I skim e-mail newsletters in my in-box, scroll through my Twitter feed, and peruse the news apps on my phone; later, in the office, I tap through my notifications and monitor more than a dozen news-related apps, including Facebook and Twitter, while juggling other tasks. I usually feel as though I’m managing to stay abreast of the day’s biggest news stories, but my reading tends to be fragmentary—I’m only skimming a story or absorbing a partial update. Although I’m reading more than ever before, it often feels like I’m understanding less.
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In 2008, the Columbia Journalism Review published an article with the headline “Overload!,” which examined news fatigue in “an age of too much information.” When “Overload!” was published, BlackBerrys still dominated the smartphone market, push notifications hadn’t yet to come to the iPhone, retweets weren’t built into Twitter, and BuzzFeed News did not exist. Looking back, the idea of suffering from information overload in 2008 seems almost quaint. Now, more than a decade later, a fresh reckoning seems to be upon us.
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Lately, I have begun to wonder, like [Cal] Newport, whether the sheer volume of online news actually runs counter to the goal of keeping people informed. Research on this question is surprisingly scant. “My hunch is that readers aren’t less informed than before,” Pablo Boczkowski, a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, told me. “They’re differently informed.” Among Boczkowski’s areas of research is how young people interact with the news today. Most do not go online seeking the news; instead, they encounter it incidentally, on social media. They might get on their phones or computers to check for updates or messages from their friends, and, along the way, encounter a post from a news site. Few people sit down in the morning to read the print newspaper or make a point of watching the TV news in the evening. Instead, they are constantly “being touched, rubbed by the news,” Bockzkowski said. “It’s part of the environment.”
How well can news be absorbed by osmosis? Studies have found that people bounce between tasks on their computers at stunning rates; a paper published last year found a median switch time of eleven seconds. Introduce mobile devices into the mix, and the switching is even faster. It’s no wonder that news is getting chopped up into smaller bits. “If you’re an average site, you have five to seven seconds to tell your story,” Boczkowski told me. It seems reasonable to guess, therefore, that people are now more aware, on a general level, of different topics in the news, but that they also have less depth of understanding in any one area. Even those readers who are inclined to engage deeply and broadly with the news are constrained by social-media filter bubbles, within which agreeable content, posted by people in their networks, is prioritized.…
Perhaps we need to recalibrate our relationship with media—to rethink how we ought to consume information more generally and what it means to be informed. In the recent book “Slow Media: Why ‘Slow’ is Satisfying, Sustainable, and Smart,” the journalist and media scholar Jennifer Rauch traces a movement that began to coalesce about a decade ago. In 2010, a document called “The Slow Media Manifesto” was published, online, by Sabria David, Jörg Blumtritt, and Benedikt Köhler—a trio of Germans with backgrounds in media and technology. It urged both journalists and readers to draw inspiration from the Slow Food movement, which emphasizes quality and timelessness. “Slow Media are not about fast consumption but about choosing the ingredients mindfully and preparing them in a concentrated manner,” the authors wrote. “Slow Media cannot be consumed casually, but provoke the full concentration of their users. As with the production of a good meal, which demands the full attention of all senses by the cook and his guests, Slow Media can only be consumed with pleasure in focused alertness.”
Rauch points to the U.K.-based quarterly Delayed Gratification, which was established in 2011, as an example of Slow Media in action. Delayed Gratification, which has a Web site but is primarily print-based, describes itself as “the world’s first Slow Journalism magazine.” It promises to revisit “the events of the previous three months to see what happened after the dust settled and the news agenda moved on” and declares itself “proud to be ‘Last to Breaking News.’ ” Meanwhile, earlier this year, James Harding, the former director of news and current affairs at the BBC; Katie Vanneck-Smith, the former president of Dow Jones; and Matthew Barzun, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom, launched Tortoise Media, which aims to publish five digital stories a day, along with a quarterly print magazine. Tortoise was formed as a direct response to the overwhelming amount of “daily noise” in the news ecosystem. “The problem isn’t just fake news or junk news,” a statement on the Web site says, “because there’s a lot of good—it’s just that there’s so much of it and so much of it is the same. In a hurry, partial, and confusing. Too many newsrooms chasing the news, but missing the story.”
Could journalism in general get slower? As I read about the Slow Media movement—which, so far, seems to be a mostly European phenomenon—I inevitably thought about trends in the magazine industry in the United States, where publications are experimenting with paywalls and churning out digital content. The appeal of Slow Media is that it pushes back against the technological pressures that are shaping journalism more broadly. (Newport advocates Slow Media in a section of his book, urging readers to join “the attention resistance.”) It is an attempt to take back control of the way we experience the news. It is also about relinquishing the illusion of knowledge that the passive consumption of news on social media facilitates and bringing our best selves to the act of becoming informed.
The challenge for all media organizations, slow or not, is to chart an economically sustainable, responsible course through this landscape of conflicting incentives and ideals. The pressures for speed and volume created by the digital age can’t be ignored—but they can be resisted. Even as publishers try to move more quickly, they can still ask themselves whether granular coverage in a given area is really making readers better informed. They can still consider sitting out certain trending stories, and they can do more, across the board, to engage with complexity. Readers, too, can begin to realize they’re being ill-served by the current media cacophony. Let’s hope that, when they search for alternatives, they will still be able to find journalism capable of rising above the din.
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You read the full piece here.
Hoop Dreams
A few weeks ago on a lazy Sunday afternoon, I watched Hoop Dreams, one of the most critically acclaimed documentaries of all time. Filmed over a period of five years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it follows the journey of two African-American boys from the poor inner-city of Chicago, William Gates and Arthur Agee, both of whom dream of one day playing in the NBA. The film starts when they are fourteen and have been recruited to attend St. Joseph High School, a prestigious all-boys private school in a wealthy area of Illinois, with a notable coach and exceptional basketball program. It takes William and Arthur over an hour and a half to travel to and from school. Other than the basketball recruits, the rest of the students are almost entirely white. The film follows William and Arthur through high school and ends as they enter college.
The reason I found Hoop Dreams so absorbing is that it’s about so much more than basketball. It touches on ideas like social mobility, economic hardship, inequality, race, the education system and life in America’s inner cities. Watching William and Arthur’s story is at various points poignant, inspiring, frustrating and tragic. Indeed, film critic Roger Ebert wrote, "This is one of the best films about American life that I have ever seen", and later called it the best film of the 1990s.
If you do decide to watch it, then I suggest reading the film’s Wikipedia page after. It contains an ‘Aftermath’ section which details what ends up happening to William and Arthur and their respective families in the years following the film’s release.
Shèna
You might not recognize her name, but you’ve probably heard Shèna’s voice before. Tracey Elizabeth McSween was born in Reading in the UK and was classically trained at the Royal Academy of Music. After performing in a number of musicals in London and working as a backing vocalist for James Brown and Mariah Carey, in the mid-1990s she started performing as a disco and house singer under the stage name Shèna. Since then, she has provided the vocals on countless club tracks, including Michael Gray’s early 2000s banger, The Weekend, Alex Gaudino’s Watch Out and JX’s You Belong to Me. This track, Let The Beat Hit ‘Em, was released in 1997.
“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr
Curio is a newsletter for curious minds seeking an escape from the noise of the news cycle. It is put together by Oli Duchesne