BOYCOTT KITTENS! (Please)

The more I talk to people and use social networks, the more I notice a general sense of dissatisfaction with the news; the topics it deals with is often considered stupid, superficial, frivolous, not informative enough, useless.

At some point, I started asking myself why these articles are even written. The answer is actually as easy as it can be: articles are written because people read them.

It doesn’t take long to prove this point: checking the “popular” or “top stories” category in any online newspaper is sufficient to discover that the most read articles have titles such as “Indian woman in her 70s gives birth to healthy baby boy”, “The day we discovered our parents were Russian spies”, “Inaction man: Vladimir Putin slips up during all-star ice hockey game”, “As a stripper I’ve spent two decades naked, and this is what I learnt” or “Indians ‘swipe left’ on Tinder ad”.

Turns out people actually like this kind of topics. Why? I have no idea. Maybe because they’re funny. Maybe because they’re easy to read. Maybe because they’re not depressing. Or maybe just because they stimulate the reader’s curiosity. What really matters is that a huge part of the global community read this type of articles, possibly even some of those complaining about news and media do.

The only conclusion I can draw from the previous considerations is totally sad: we people don’t really like to think. We love trash news because it’s entertaining without demanding any mental effort, we’d stare at a bunch of sleeping kittens on a screen for hours rather than trying to get some real information in a non-superficial way.

I really wish we stopped blaming the media for feeding our ignorance and laziness, and started doing something concrete about it.

Change is in our hands.