Breathe
By Pamela Cerdeira
It happened while reading a newspaper online, many years ago. I have forgotten what the article was about, but not the comments. Things like "Once again manipulating information to defend their usual little group, nobody believes them anymore!" or "Surely they don't even know what they are talking about, they are only trying to divide the country with their biased news" and so on and so forth in all their varieties. I was fascinated to read the comments, my animal side moved by the emotional charge they had, and my journalistic side that believed that maybe there, in the comments, I would find a clue to something else, a piece of history that had not been written. I must confess that I have never found anything newsworthy at the bottom of the posts, and yet I have been able to detect disinformation campaigns using innocent comments from anonymous or publicly recognized users. What surprised me that time is that I noticed that I was spending more time reading the comments than the notes. I do not want to underestimate the importance of feedback (the comments to my columns in this space have almost always been answered, and all of them have been very valuable, in a symptom that is explained by the quality of readers that Opinión 51 has ; as a medium, we are the exception). An article or an opinion column, no matter how little work it is, will have taken at least an hour. If it is published in a media outlet, it will have gone through a review process that involves more than one person. That's not to say that everything written in a media outlet is infallible or true, but, unlike those who write comments on social networks, if we get it wrong we stake our credibility, the most important asset in our profession. When someone posts a visceral comment, they didn't check it beforehand (or with their phone's spell checker), it took less than a minute (and that includes time to think about whether to write and what to write), and they have nothing to lose. It's appealing because it's emotional. So, spending more time reading the comments than the notes was definitely a waste of time. I was paying attention to the junk of journalism: lots of adrenaline, zero nutritional content.
This started to happen to me on social networks, the addiction to scroll down. As if it were a sinister movie from which it is impossible to separate, the comments to the posts of those who were the subjects of the news were the most interesting part. (Not as funny when you are the one on the screen, but just as obsessive).
Reading down was taking time away from reading up and up: less time for books, less time to read other notes and other media, less time to talk to interesting people. I could spend my time thinking up (learning something new, finding a different point of view), but I was wasting it thinking down.
The only thing I learned from my addiction times is that trolls compulsively use this emoji 🤣, which gives me the impression that whoever wrote it urgently needs professional help.
In a way, the algorithm of scroll down, reels, videos on TikTok that we didn't choose but were chosen for us, takes us to the same place. The algorithm locks us into what we like or makes us angry, and repeats what we already know to feed our ego. There is amazing content on the internet and social media, but just as we do with books, make sure that where you are going to put your time is chosen by you.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
Comments ()