SLOW NEWS IS GOOD NEWS

I was watching a TED Talk recently featuring Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, explaining why we should be optimistic going into the future. It’s a tough corner to argue, but he piqued my interest when he said that modern day media gives us a negative view of the world.

“When we are compressing our news cycle to the last five minutes and the next five minutes, all the things that have happened in the last five minutes are kind of bad stuff,” he says. “If we were to make newspapers and websites be updated every 100 years, we’d have a very different set of headlines.”

It’s a valid point. You will not get a Google alert about someone whose life was saved by a standard medical procedure. Nor will the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper have a picture of someone who wasn’t mugged on the way home from work. The old saying: if it bleeds it leads. In general, bad news attracts more attention than good. That goes double for the fast moving world of digital media. In Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus, he writes about negativity bias, the phenomenon by which people tend to stare at something negative and outrageous for a lot longer than they will stare at something positive and calm. The result? The algorithms that manage our online feeds prioritise items that push our emotional buttons.

“On YouTube, what are the words that you should put into the title of your video, if you want to get picked up by the algorithm?” Hari writes. “They are –according to the best site monitoring YouTube trends – words such as ‘hates, obliterates, slams, destroys’.”

It’s interesting to note, especially in a world where we increasingly accept that videos are the best way of transmitting information to young learners.

In fact, numerous studies are now showing the existence of “screen inferiority” – people retain less information if they read it on a screen, compared to a printed page. According to Hari, this gap in understanding between books and screens is big enough that in elementary school children, it’s the equivalent of two thirds of a year’s growth in reading comprehension.

I’m not here to rubbish online media. I spend my fair share of time on socials and other websites. But I do want to take a moment to appreciate the article that you are now reading as an example of something calmer, something slower, hopefully something that will stay with you a little longer.

Here, away from the braying alerts and social media sirens, you’ll find a couple of positive feature stories – one about a refrigeration system helping a third generation family business go boldly into the future (p. 10), and another on our increasing awareness of the full life cycle in building and construction (p. 20).

I invite you to pause, ignore the messages and alerts with their calamitous headlines, and enjoy browsing through these pages for some good news from the world of HVAC&R.

Mark Vender Editor