I live in a noisy neighbourhood with road traffic and trains honking. It’s bad enough, made worse by my tinnitus and associated noise sensitivity. And recently major road maintenance and a nearby apartment renovation project had made it near-unbearable for months. I resorted to a combination of earplugs, noise-cancelling headphones and piping white noise though them. It didn’t shut out everything but it made me functional.
The immediate noise spike has passed, but I’m now dealing with a new double whammy: a serious crisis within the family and the second coronavirus wave outside. As I spend a lot of time simply waiting (the crisis has sapped my ability to think, consult, advise, even write meaningfully), I spend a lot more time scrolling through news websites, reddit and twitter – hours on end. Relatives I’m staying with watch local news that operates in perennial breaking news mode, sensationalising the simple and optimising for outrage.
Twitter’s algorithms themselves undermine my experience – my deliberately curated follower list and keyword filters amount to nought as I’m suggested topics I have no interest in or am actively trying to avoid, and alerted to actions by people related to the people I follow – people who discuss the very subjects I’m keeping away from. Reddit is full of outrage from the United States. I can no longer rely on news, whether TV or online, for perspective. The constant optimization for eyeballs and clicks is beyond disheartening (right now: oxygen tank leak kills 22 followed a few dozen pixels below by katrina kaif tests negative for covid).
All in all, I will have to apply the same damping techniques to information noise that I did to real-world noise: specifically, training myself to run off reddit, twitter and news websites. Limit how often I read though my whatsapp groups. Catch up on my reading on the kindle. It’s only been twenty four hours. I hope it helps.