A critical examination of social media's role in driving the online news economy and how that is harming democratic politics as well as people's well-being
Is engagement with current affairs key to being a good citizen? Or could an endless torrent of notifications be harming democracy as well as our wellbeing? Tweets: @oliverburkeman , @_mattcardin , and @ninanjira See also Mediagazer Tweets: Oliver Burkeman / @oliverburkeman : Here's my @gdnlongread today about how the news took over reality. The news is not your life, and you do not have a moral duty to care about everything bad in the world 24/7. In fact you may have a duty *not* to. http://www.theguardian.com/... Matt Cardin / @_mattcardin : This is so full of insightful moments that I couldn't decide on just a single sentence to quote. Obsession with “the news,” especially politics, combined with a new belief that it' one's civic duty to stay plugged into the maelstrom, is killing us. https://www.theguardian.com/ ... Nanjira / @ninanjira : “Social media blurs the distinction between making considered public comments on the news and impulsively emitting snatches of one's half-formed private impressions of it; and it rewards and amplifies the most extreme expressions of emotion.” Oof. https://www.theguardian.com/ ... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Oliver Burkeman's long read lands mid-arc in a debate that had already produced two notable experiments: Farhad Manjoo's two-month print-only news diet for the New York Times, which concluded digital formats had broken how he processed information, and the platform-critique literature building through 2018. Burkeman's contribution is to flip the civic framing — arguing that the moral duty to follow bad news around the clock is itself part of what social media's engagement economics manufactures.
First-order effects
- Readers are the immediate constituency: the piece argues the notification-driven news cycle imposes a false moral obligation to engage with every crisis, with measurable costs to wellbeing.
- Journalists and newsrooms face the direct critique, since their distribution now runs through platforms whose incentives reward the volume and urgency Burkeman identifies as corrosive.
Second-order effects
- Alternatives gain ground: by December 2019, media historians and designers were coalescing around human-curated "slow media" as a replacement model, directly answering the engagement-economy critique.
- Researchers respond institutionally rather than editorially — by 2021 they were calling for the study of social media's societal impact to be treated as a "crisis discipline", like climate science, formalizing the harm question Burkeman raised journalistically.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry splits between engagement-maximizing feeds and deliberately slower, curated products — though later coverage shows the evidence base stays contested, with some researchers finding the societal-harm fears overstated even as individual-effects concerns persist.
- The longer-term stakes are democratic: whether citizenship gets defined by constant consumption or by selective attention becomes a design question for platforms, not just a personal one for readers.
The trend: News consumption is being reframed from a civic obligation served by always-on social feeds into a design problem, with curators and researchers challenging the engagement economics that platforms built.