200. WHAT ARE WE DOING TO OURSELVES? - Ethical Digital Hygiene

As 2025 began and X owner and promoter of fascism, Elon Musk, decided to spend the start of the year trying to intervene in UK democracy by going on a Labour Party witch-hunt, it should have become self-evident to anyone with a moral conscience that supporting Musk and his far-right allies anymore by continuing to use the social media platform formerly known as Twitter is simply morally unacceptable.

Yet, despite the awfulness of Musk, X continues to thrive. Why? Because it continues to be where the majority of journalists and politicians live online (and teachers - don’t forget those supposed moral role models of character, the teaching profession, who refuse to leave the site as their main location for professional discussion). The ‘news’ is made on X and the ‘conversation’ is happening there. So people stay, even as it infects the world with its toxicity.

The phenomenon made me think about how much journalist culture influences the actual culture of the society they are supposed to serve and inform. Not just in making it difficult for otherwise ethical citizens to remove themselves from what has become a platform for far-right hate, but in other, even more insidious, ways.

The other night I was sat chatting happily to my wife, when the conversation was interrupted by a buzzing on my phone. A news headline from the BBC: Drag Race superstar, The Vivienne, had died.

We both loved The Vivienne. We’re huge Drag Race fans. The news hit us and, even though we don’t know the drag queen personally, our moods were suddenly dampened.

A few weeks before that, festive Christmas moments were occasionally interrupted by news of German Christmas market massacres, exploding Teslas outside Las Vegas hotels, and New Orleans tragedies. Today, as I write this, I have been sent escalating death tolls and carnage reports of LA wildfires and a 14 year old boy being stabbed on a London bus.

It has made me ask myself: why do I get news headlines sent to my phone?

This is not a burying the head in the sand retreat into “positive vibes only”. I don’t want to not be informed of what is going on. As a conscientious citizen, I certainly want to be kept informed about the world and think we have a moral obligation to stay up to date with what is going on. But I am not a journalist or politician. I do not necessarily need to know about everything that happens the very moment that it happens. I have no requirement to have an immediate “hot take” on the latest news headlines and certainly no need to spring into action the moment such events are brought to my attention.

I realised I was keeping myself informed as if I were a journalist or politician and that, somehow, this has become the norm for many of us.

I thought back to my childhood. Pre-internet. The news on TV or radio at designated times or bought in paper form each morning. People were still informed back then. Maybe even more so, as the spiralling misinformation which comes from places like X, Facebook and Instagram was absent from the news diet and gatekeepers prevented the constant erosion of a shared reality (another one of the week’s headlines was the decision to remove fact-checkers at Meta. A final concession to the post-truth dreamworld and dismissal of shared objective reality). Are we better now for having the news non-stop, direct to our pocket whenever something happens, than we were back then? Or are we more likely to read a notification about a massacre with the same level of desensitised disinterest that we read a notification about another new marketing email or D-list celebrity going live on Instagram? Or, as per my initial point, rather than being desensitised, are we continuously and unexpectedly stimulated and agitated by a constant, erratic, and jarring stream of shocks and tragedies we have no ability to properly process and no requirement to receive?

There is a psychological difference between actively choosing to sit down and read or watch the news and having a news headline pounce into your brain unexpectedly. In the former situation, I am ready for the possibility of awfulness. I am prepared to receive the bad news. In the latter, I am celebrating my birthday when all of a sudden I am told that children are dying in untold numbers across our once-trusted healthcare system. Happy birthday to me!?!

Speaking about this with some colleagues at work this week, we all agreed that there had been news events which had marred our lives. Waking up and immediately being exposed to the latest gloom on our screens before we’d even had our first coffee was not good for our mental health. That there was a constant background sense of anxiety that something is about to happen, or is happening, and we need to keep up despite having no professional or civic reason to.

But there was also concern about missing something important.

“What if I didn’t know that the Queen had died?” asked one.

“If a storm is going to take out my home I’d want to know” said another.

But I pointed out that in huge news events such as the death of a monarch you were unlikely to avoid the story. Coming into work the next morning, surely the news would spread. Or on social media. You might not be connected directly to headlines coming into your phone, but a check of Instagram to see what your friends are up to, if the news is sufficiently big, will likely show a few reactions to the story that might make you want to read the news.

Most importantly, getting rid of immediate headlines to your phone is not advocating not reading the news at all. It is suggesting we develop a more intentional relationship to the news rather than being at the whim of journalists with a quota of social media activity to generate each day. If you check the news in the evening, or morning, or both, you will still find out about the dead monarch or imminent storm. Just like we did back before the internet. Just not necessarily the very minute that it happens.

With no direct headlines to my phone I still remember the death of Diana and 9/11, the fall of Thatcher, the election of Bill Clinton, the election of Tony Blair. Hanging chads in Florida and mad cow disease across the UK. I was a school kid myself when the Dunblane massacre happened, and I learned about it when I got home from school, not while I was in the classroom trying to concentrate on a maths lesson. I was no more, or less, protected by having the delay in information. And I was at my mentally worse in moments like 9/11, when I happened to be watching the news live and saw events unfold in real time. When we happened to switch on TV in the middle of the night the evening Diana died and got hooked into the never-ending speculation and empty reporting, preventing us from sleep despite not even caring about the monarchy or having spent a single moment thinking about Diana in the years before her car-crash.

The question I keep coming back to is: why do we need the immediacy?

Again, I understand why a journalist or politician might need it, but why your average citizen? Why can we never take a break from the potential mind-bomb our phones might hurl at us whenever we least expect it? A coup? A new pandemic? A terrorist attack? Another stupid thing said by Elon Musk and taken as gospel by his acolytes?

What is the argument for having these headlines come to us instead of choosing our own time and place to engage with news events?

For the life of me, I can’t think of a good one. So, as a birthday present to myself, last week I switched the headlines off. If you can think of a good reason that I need to turn them back on, let me know in the comments, but I bet that you can’t.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

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