Urjita Mainali, Contributing Writer
There’s no escaping the news these days.
The algorithms that shape social media are ubiquitous to today’s culture — pushing the news to the front of our feeds. Worse, these algorithms tend to promote the most miserable news because it drives engagement. This incentivizes people — and even some news networks — to promote the worst headlines, sometimes even making them up. This issue has only exacerbated with the increasing quality of AI generated photos and videos.
Like many students on this campus, I’m personally invested in justice for sexual assault victims and for the protection of women and young girls. My social media algorithm seems to know this. Every feed on every platform has shown me every update on the Epstein files. Even though I care about this issue, it’s hard for me to see and read all these updates due to their explicit and disturbing content.
There’s really no “one size fits all” formula for media literacy, in the same way that there’s no single understanding of mental health. However, frequent exposure to these updates have left me hopeless and despairing. Despite this, it didn’t feel right to me to turn away from media and news consumption entirely — something needed to change.
The ease of access to distressing and disturbing news, information and images has led to concerns about the relationship between news and mental health.
Recent studies have discovered evidence that frequent exposure to news during times of crisis can lead to increased anxiety and poor mental health. This exposure can trigger your “fight or flight” response, which is associated with a rise in stress hormones, according to Mental Health America.
However, these facts exist within the reality that engagement with the news is necessary to remain an informed and responsible member of the community. Understanding what’s happening in the world and how it impacts others helps you conduct yourself in a way that is both empathetic and ethical.
That doesn’t mean that sacrificing your mental health is the “good” thing to do.
I’ve seen many people, especially in activist spaces, shame others for not being informed “enough” on a certain issue or event. However, when people are inundated with bad news — and it’s always bad news — people become at risk for burn out or submitting to hopelessness.
It’s important to be informed, but it’s also important to protect your mental health for one simple reason — when you’re feeling well, you can help others feel better.
If you care about an issue — or just people in general — it’s easy to feel as though you need to know everything, immediately. This is especially true when it seems like many people online agree that if you don’t know every detail, then you’re failing morally.
But the reality is that understanding how much information you need to stay informed while still keeping yourself safe is key to successfully creating real change. Knowing where and what the problem is while being well enough to help solve it is the best way to contribute to a movement.
That’s where an understanding of media literacy informed by psychological wellness comes in. Rather than focusing on every new headline or image, it’s about understanding what you need to know and see to be informed enough so that if you are called on to help, you’d understand the situation and be able to act effectively.
An understanding of media literacy that considers mental health isn’t one that asks you to ignore the news. Instead, it is one that asks you to become both informed enough and healthy enough to actually make change.