The News: A User's Manual

Personalization

You can manually control many elements of Google News. The central place for your customization settings can be found by clicking on the ‘Personalize your news’ button, which appears as a gear icon in the top right corner of the Google News homepage. In these settings you can adjust how much you prefer to see of news from a given section by adjusting the slider toward the plus sign (+), or the minus sign (–).

Google News

1.

THERE WAS ONCE a time when we consumed all that we were given of the news – thirty pages of a paper or half an hour of a bulletin – and trusted that those in charge of providing it had more or less accurately captured the most significant events of the world within the means available. Technology has taught us otherwise. We are now conscious that the supply of news is almost infinite; that every day yields another exabyte of images and words, and that newspapers and news bulletins are in truth thimblefuls of information arbitrarily pulled out of a boundless ocean of data by hard-pressed editors, daily forced to do no better than guess at the desires of a putative ‘average reader’.

Inevitably, they don’t always get it right. They may go on too long about a West African war or an incomprehensible debt repayment scheme. They may update us against our will about a society wedding or a Caribbean hurricane. We may feel as if we were being force-fed entrées we never ordered.

But it won’t necessarily always go on like this. Technology promises to give us the power to tell our computers about our tastes and then have them automatically sift through the day’s offerings to present us with bulletins precisely tailored to our personalities. No longer will the supply of news be dictated only by the sometimes wrong-headed assumptions of editors. We will have achieved an individualistic Utopia: a world with as many varied news channels in it as there are audience members.

2.

YET THE PROSPECT of giving up on objective editorial direction has its alarming aspects, for it begs the question of how well equipped most of us really are to know what sort of news we need to be confronted by.

The ambition of living a good adult life in a modern democracy requires that we take on board all kinds of knowledge to help us to remain moral, self-aware and safe and to assist us in discharging our public and private responsibilities effectively. Yet some of this knowledge may not seem especially appealing at first sight. Left in charge of programming our own news, we risk cutting ourselves off from information that might be deeply important to our evolution. Far from helping us to develop a rich and complex individuality, ‘personalized news’ might end up aggravating our pathologies and condemning us to mediocrity.

Imagine how personalization would have worked for, say, Marie Antoinette – someone temperamentally squeamish about distressing Political news and who would have been drawn to turning up the dial on Fashion and Entertainment. Word that 5,000 of her subjects were starving in Rennes might have been sacrificed to an exhaustive report on the dresses sported by guests at a party given by the Duchesse de Polignac – an ordering of priorities that would have revealed itself as a problem only by October 1793, as the queen awaited her fate on the guillotine steps.

Or picture a man with a strong desire to avoid feeling envy, empowered by new technology to choke off the supply of any news about successful people. Pleased though he might be at having freed himself from what he termed ‘silly stories’, he might also miss some critical if uncomfortable clues as to his own development and future direction.

Equally blinkered in a different way, another person might want to hear of nothing but tragedy in the underdeveloped world. But what if this exclusive attention to tales of starvation and butchery were being used as a noble but emotionally convenient excuse for not expressing affection towards better-fed but more demanding people closer to home?

Personalization would be an improvement over the current editorial system if, and only if, users had a highly mature and complex sense of what sort of news they needed to hear. But this would require them, before they could be let anywhere near the dashboard used to program the news-stream, to get to know their own souls extremely well. Only after extensive self-examination, perhaps with the help of a psychoanalyst, would they be adequately prepared to set the dials on their personal news engines, aware of the sorts of stories that were needed to challenge their defences, expand their horizons and excite in them the right sort of envy. Like all gateways to increased freedom of choice, the prospect of personalized news serves only to highlight the difficulties of choosing wisely.

3.

THE ISSUE OF personalization returns us to a question that informs much of this book: What should the news ideally be? What are the deep needs to which it should cater? How could it optimally enrich us?

We have examined six types of news to try to define what sort of role they might play for us:

Political News

In the face of all the distractions and confusions thrown at us, political news should elicit our interest in the complex mechanics of our societies, help us to agitate intelligently for their reform and accept certain obdurate limitations without fury. Political news should create a rounded, tolerable nation in the imagination of its audience, allowing for moments of pride and collective sympathy. It should monitor not just those in power but all the systemic ills that hold back the community, while additionally recognizing its own momentous capacity to influence the values of the nation it comments on.

World News

This subspeciality should open our eyes to the nature of life in foreign countries above and beyond their moments of bloodthirsty and dramatic crisis, which paradoxically block our capacities for empathy and identification. It should set aside its obsession with neutral reporting in order to give us rich, sensory and intermittently personal portraits of other nations. It should, by appropriating some of the techniques of travel literature and by constant recourse to great photo journalism, help us to humanize the Other in our minds, shaking us out of our globalized provincialism.

Economic News

Ideally, this genre would not only illuminate current economic developments but also investigate the many intelligent and workable theoretical approaches which could effect saner, more fulfilling versions of market capitalism, thereby quashing both our unnecessary cynicism and our immature rage. It would at the same time represent the activities of businesses in terms that stretched beyond the cold economic data required by investors. It would evoke the human realities that lie beneath our products so as to prompt helpful feelings of gratitude, righteous anger, guilt and awe.

Celebrity News

In this category, we would be introduced to some of the most admirable people of our era – as judged by mature and subtle criteria – and guided as to how we might draw inspiration and advice from them. The famous would make us envious in productive and measured ways, helping us to realize our own genuine but timid talents by the example of their audacity and perseverance. But we would also be reminded that the best cure for a longing for fame would ultimately be a world in which kindness and respect were more generously and evenly distributed.

Disaster News

The tragedies of others should remind us how close we ourselves often are to behaving in amoral, blinkered or violent ways. Seeing the consequences of such impulses harrowingly played out in the lives of strangers should leave us feeling at once scared and sympathetic rather than hubristic and self-righteous. For their part, the accidents that every day cut down our fellow human beings should demonstrate to us how exposed we constantly are to the risk of sudden death and injury, and therefore make clear with what gratitude and generosity we should greet every pain-free hour.

Consumer News

This field of journalism should alert us to how complicated it is, within an aggressively commercial society, to generate genuine happiness by spending money. It should strive therefore deftly to direct us to those objects and services (and, just as important, those manoeuvres of mind) which stand the best chance of answering our underlying aspirations for a fulfilled existence.

4.

BUT EVEN IF, by a succession of miracles, the news managed one day to do all of the above reliably, we would still retain a handful of reasons for ongoing caution …