Information media is information presented through a medium that positions itself as important or helpful. In practice, information media is the stuff we watch on video platforms, the stuff we consume on news websites, the stuff we read in captions and posts, the stuff we listen to on podcasts or the radio, or the stuff we send each other through instant messaging. And this sort of stuff is becoming the most popular media genre.
Which matters because our most developed sense-making mechanism—that being our ability to craft narratives—is impacted by the media we consume. And It’s clear that in developing a taste for information media we have become the type of people who don’t know how to convey, consume, or appreciate stories. It’s clear that our preference for data and quick-bits has caused us to forget that we navigate life by quality of the stories we can tell not by the quality of the data we can access.
And so, in efforts to defend our ability to craft stories and to diminish its popular alternative I’d like to present a new way to view information media. Information media is new stuff about the same shit. Information media is incoherent trivia fodder. Information media is substance-less filler that we’re convinced is somehow relevant. Information media is the stone which dulls the blade of our sharpest sense. Information media is a deluge of data that we can neither organize nor apply. Information media is a trojan horse that degrades our ability to interpret the world around us.
Information media is not just facts about stuff, it’s an attempt to organize the immense multitude of reality into bites of data and clickable headlines that in effect, transform our perception of the way things are and therefore the world itself. Information media has convinced us to trade away one of our most valuable tools for facts about the best way to swing a golf club, average returns for the S&P 500, or the dangers of consuming too much whey-protein. And I think it’s time we reverse the deal. I think its time we get back to crafting stories that escape velocity, soar above and beyond the bezels of our digital devices, and shift our gaze to from seeing how bad things are to searching for how good things could be.