The World In Fragments

I was in the car with my wife and kids on a short vacation with my extended family when my dad sent me a text that the U.S. had started dropping bunker busters on Iranian nuclear facilities. Like any good parent, I generally try to stay as present as I can when my children are with me. As with any parent, that’s sometimes a challenge. Normally it’s the incessant chatter of social media and private chat groups that steals my attention away, though I’ve gotten better at ignoring those. But from time to time it’s the actual news.

I told my wife what was happening, and instead of reminding me, as she has a thousand times before, to put my phone away when the family is together, she volunteered to switch driving with me after lunch so I could dive into my twitter hole. This time, we both understood, it wasn’t some stupid online squabble that was competing for my attention; it was an actual war. Sometimes it’s ok to be distracted.

I found myself checking my phone through lunch, as I would throughout the next couple of days, to find out if Iran had struck back, whether we were truly in another Middle Eastern war. I work in journalism, so I like to stay on top of the news, but more than that, it felt important as a human being in a moment of peril such as this to keep track of what was unfolding in the real world outside of the narrow bubble of my immediate, vacation-bound existence. It felt like the morally responsible thing to do.

But this was where I began to feel a touch of existential cognitive dissonance. I’ve become accustomed to thinking of the world on my screen — the world of breaking news — as a synthetic reality that steals time away from my actual life with my kids, my wife, my friends and relatives. For the most part that’s exactly what it is. But it’s also the looking glass through which I expand my horizons beyond my comfortable middle class American existence, as any good global citizen should do.

It’s hard to reconcile the two. We deplore the bubbles we live in, which shelter us from the bleak realities of the world that we’d rather turn away from: poverty, starvation, war, genocide. We expect ourselves to bear witness to the crimes and tragedies befalling millions of people in countries we’ve never set foot in — it’s literally the least we can do. But when we shift our focus to those tragedies, it’s by turning our eyes toward the same screens that are relentlessly hawking us Blue Chews and Grand Theft Auto 6, that bait us with cartoon memes and fake AI humanoids, that goad us into outrage with news clips stripped of context and dishonest headlines designed to reinforce our prior assumptions and prejudices. It’s like taking Communion in a strip club.

So we learn of the latest news from Gaza in a stream of undifferentiated verbal vomit that looks something like this:

absolutely INSANE footage coming out of nyc right now WOW JK Rowling is a TERF CUNT who deserves to DIE a SLOW DEATH an infant died of starvation this morning in a NICU for lack of milk due to Israel’s humanitarian blockade GOD BLESS TRUMP FOR MAKING LIBTARDS SCARED AGAIN the Islamic-left alliance is paving the way for the next Holocaust lmfao Ted Cruz is a sea cucumber in a human flesh suit KEEP HER UP ALL NIGHT WITH BLUE CHEWS Gaza tent encampment bombed by IDF 14 people dead in blaze holy shit this new kendrick lamar is straight fire

This is the medium through which we learn of the gravest events that befall humankind. It’s how we become informed of a US military strike on Iran, riots in Los Angeles, an escalation of the war in Ukraine. After learning of the breaking news, we might then turn to the New York Times for a less adulterated experience, but even there, the Times’ Live Updates feed reduces our news consumption into 200 word chunks, refreshed every 20 or so minutes. It’s cleaner, more reliable, more serious and less toxic than your social media news feed, but it mimics it in form if not in content. No less than Twitter or Facebook, it turns events into posts.

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