When it Comes to News, “More is Less”

Here’s a question to consider: when you see an interesting headline in the news, do you then read the entire article? Thirty years ago, your answer would have been “usually yes.” Today, it’s invariably going to be “hardly ever.” Why the difference?

You can probably guess my answer from the headline here: we are inundated (occasionally overwhelmed) by information and “news.” This has two related consequences. First, there’s so much “happening,” that to be “up on it all” we have to ingest lots of news, info etc. Second, the phenomenon called FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out. No matter how much time and energy we spend as news readers/listeners/viewers, there’s always a good chance that we’ve missed something important that still another news vendor is offering.

Several online newspapers (forgive the anachronistic word “paper” here) have taken to offering “AI synopses” of important news articles so that the reader doesn’t have to spend “too much” time on each. Other vendors note the article’s word count: an indirect “warning” of its length; some even note how many minutes it will take to read it! (The Times of Israel doesn’t offer synopses, but the headlines tend to be more informative, as are the longer sub-headlines.)

Not that the article length “problem” is a relatively new one. Go online and seek out your favorite newspaper’s archival material – and look at its news from a century ago. Back then, news items were invariably much longer, most without any visual accompaniment. Indeed, back in the 19th century many literary authors doubled as journalists to make extra money, getting paid by the word (except for when they had to telegraph the story to the editorial desk – that cost a pretty penny for each word!). In short (pun intended), the average news word count has been dropping like a rock in the lake for several centuries.

But at least back then the reader didn’t have multiple news sites – and even if the largest cities had several newspapers, few had the money to buy them all on a daily basis. Whatever was in your hand, you’d spend lots of time going through it all. Today, with most online news venues offering free news (The Times of Israel is a good example), we skim the headlines because they are not something we’re usually paying for. And as I said, there are so many other news sources out there to get to (not to mention the “need” to leave time for social media engagement).

Some academic analysts consider all this to be the “dumbing down” of the news audience. Not quite. Rather, it’s the “superficialization” of news consumption. More news quantity at the cost of quality is not necessarily a function of a lower “news IQ,” but rather our conscious choice to be broader instead of deeper – what Isaiah Berlin called (among the field of academics) the fox and the hedgehog: the former covers lots of ground but somewhat superficially; the latter digs deep, but with a narrow field of vision.

Given that we are talking here about a very long-term trend, what does the future hold in store? In a word: AI. Even if the news suppliers continue offering “long-form” items, more and more of us (especially the younger generation) are going to ask for short summaries; for the few news items that we find particularly interesting and/or important we’ll ask AI for a bit more “depth.” In short, newspaper articles of the usual mid-range length will basically constitute raw material for AI synopses.

To be sure, AI is not the cause of this but rather a tool reflecting the declining attention span of Gen-Z (those born between 1997 and 2012), the first to grow up in the age of social media with its “snippet culture.” As someone who has been teaching college students for close to 50 years, I clearly see the decline in their ability to read “regular-length” research articles; indeed, even a video segment running more than two minutes causes them to shuffle in their seats. Thus, AI hasn’t led to their lower attention span. Rather, it reflects the new generation’s greater need (and lower ability?) to deal with material demanding serious attention, and perhaps it is also accelerating that trend.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, with AI we are “hoist with our own petard.” It helps us deal with the world’s information flood, but it also appreciably adds to that flood because today it’s so much easier for journalists through AI to produce (write, film etc.) the news!

Which brings us to what is perhaps the primary problem with today’s news: AI hallucinations (or distortions). AI does such a good job of delivering the news in whatever format, that it is getting harder and harder to distinguish truth from fiction – not just text but visuals too. Which means that there will be even more news in the future compared to today: some real and some fake. At that point, “more will really be less.”

This is not a minor headache. Rather, it strikes at the very heart of democracy and public policymaking, for if the electorate can’t tell true from false, and is too overwhelmed by all the “news” to try and separate the wheat from the chaff among the myriad items, our modern system of government will be in deep trouble. What can be done? How to escape from the “More is Less” trap? Stay tuned: next week I’ll offer several possible “solutions.”