The Ick of Infotainment
One of the sheerest ironies of today is the denial that most things we deem as important are merely a form of entertainment.
The fanciest of jobs in the most prestigious white-collar industries often have a minor impact on society (if not, a negative impact at best). The news is something we put on while making our coffee to drown out the noise of our minds — getting invested in situations that are often far away from us and divorced from our own privileged lives.
Books were once scarce resources afforded by a minority, now they’re produced in abundance and available for free at the nearest street corner.
Even so, we no longer choose them as our primary form of information. We have podcasts, YouTube videos, TikToks and Tweets and Threads. Information is easy to produce and with the click of a button you can do it too, regardless of whether it’s actually “correct”. This is the information age.
Most people who create this content are in some way, touting themselves as a proponent of truth. Those who consume this ‘brain candy’ (a nice phrase I heard recently) can indulge themselves in the feeling that they are smarter and more intellectually stimulated than the average person.
Most of these people, in most cases, are wrong. This is a consequence of the information age. More information does not automatically lead to a better understanding or better insight. More information — and the ease of its creation now leads to more confusion rather than less. Hence the term ‘post-truth society’.
“…Fiction is a certain packaging of the truth, or higher truths. Indeed I find that there is more truth in Proust, albeit it is officially fictional, than in the babbling analyses of the New York Times that give us the illusions of understanding what’s going on. Newspapers have officially the right facts, but their interpretations are imaginary – and their choice of facts are arbitrary. They lie with right facts; a novelist says the truth with wrong facts.” – Nassim Taleb
If you’re someone who likes to bask in knowledge and take pride in every millimetre of it that you attain, you may find yourself feeling the numbness of the information age a little too often. You might read a lot, but you read books that take themselves too seriously, written by the authors who do the same.
Infotainment books (you know, the type of books that are endorsed on every trite alpha male podcast known to man) will have chapters that begin with sentences such as “This research study at the University of (blank) found that….” or have multiple chapters devoted to some theory formulated by the author that is just a different version of another theory written by another author before.
Infotainment also contrdicts itself. Do you find yourself reading acclaimed non-fiction books that say different things about the same topic, and yet all seem correct in their own way?
Maybe you’re not getting 8 hours of sleep and take to one of your favourite productivity gurus on YouTube to tell you what you should do. One of them tells you that you should be going to bed at an earlier time. But then another says that ‘studies show’ we don’t necessarily always need 8 hours of sleep and some people simply can get on with less sleep.
You’ll see that Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink says that our snap, intuitive judgements when making decisions are often more reliable than the excessive rationalising we may otherwise perform to come to a decision. But then you’ll read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman — which explains that these two systems of thought (logical/slow and fast/intuitive) work together to shape our decisions.
This is why reading and writing infotainment is exhausting, it numbs our senses and makes us feel too reliant on it.
I’m sure anyone who also reads and writes non-fiction on platforms like Medium comes across the same feeling of dread every now and then — the feeling that you know what you’re saying can be contradicted by an array of other ideas or concepts.
How can writing something that’s supposed to be serious and insightful feel so unserious, and uninsightful?
I especially feel this when reading my past — journalistic — articles from the past. I feel like barfing at my over-intellectualising. I feel like barfing at my excessive attempts to sound rational.
That doesn’t mean I would stop writing non-fiction infotainment altogether. I enjoy writing on Medium, and I enjoy intellectualising stuff more than I need to. That being said, fiction is much more rewarding and abstract.
The same way that people who read more fiction are believed to be more empathetic and emotionally intelligent than those who do not — writing fiction brings with it a greater experience of artistry. It’s the one act that does not require truth in its basic definition. It engages with your imagination far more than non-fiction. It gives your mind a greater experience of coming up with something, from nothing.
Many non-fiction writers are also aware of this. They know the best way to articulate an idea is to dress it up in a story. But many do not.
As a result, their ideas remain stuck at the bottom of a well, that are only accessed by readers who are able to deal with the dryness and verbosity of such content.
It can be tedious listening to people who are trying so hard to be right, and pretending that writing isn’t simply a form of entertainment above all else.
Writing with an attempt to get to the truth can still lead to good work. But if we neglect our ability to enjoy creative writing, we may find that we are exhausted and slowly forgetting our imagination.
