How to Read the News

07.31.2020 HOW TO READ THE NEWS The CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google — known in some circles as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — appeared before Congress this past week. Each company has been accused of breaking antitrust laws, competing in cutthroat and illegal ways for ever-increasing portions of our attention.    The myriad ways in which Big Tech affects our lives can boggle the mind. It can feel as if there is no escaping their reach. In our tech-saturated world, it’s important for us to be mindful of what we watch, listen to, and read. Sister True Dedication — a former BBC journalist — writes in her article “What Do You Put in Your Mind?”, when we engage in mindful consumption, we also must consider our consumption of media. As she writes, “Our mind is made of what we feed it.”   The following articles offer teachings to help us navigate as we swim in the digital stream. Holly Stocking shares how to follow the news in ways that nurture — not diminish — wellbeing. Yael Shy invites readers to bring some mindfulness into their digital lives, and Sister True Dedication shares why you need to pay attention to what nourishes your mind. (And if you like Sister True Dedication’s teaching, read her additional tips for keeping your head clear in the modern media landscape here.)   —Ross Nervig, audience engagement editor, LionsRoar.com

What Do You Put in Your Mind? Just as you consume food, you consume media. And like food, some media is wholesome and some is unhealthy. Sister True Dedication on why you need to pay attention to what nourishes your mind. I heard Thich Nhat Hanh speak with a fierce and solemn voice as he declared in a talk, “When we watch television and movies we consume, when we browse the internet we consume, when we listen to music or a conversation, we consume.” I remember his soft words booming through the loudspeakers: “And what we consume every day may be highly toxic. It may contain violence, craving, fear, anger, and despair.”

Seeing Beyond the Screen Yael Shy invites millennials to bring some mindfulness into their digital lives. I deeply understand the pull of social media. I find pleasure reading about the goings-on of friends and family who live far away, appreciate the notifications about events and interesting articles, and I like getting affirmation for my posts and photos. I am pretty certain, however, that I could obtain all of those pleasures in about one hour on the site per day, or less. What I do instead is spend hours of my life scrolling, getting lost in articles, comment conversations, and other people’s photo albums. Like staring blankly at a television screen, the endless scroll allows my brain to zone out from my life and float away.

How to Read the News How can we follow the news in ways that nurture – not diminish – wellbeing? Author, Buddhist, and media scholar Holly Stocking offers some guidance. Often these days I think of the news, like everything else, as a mirror. Our reactions to it can show us what we need to work on, to tame our own tumultuous minds.   Not long after I began thinking about this subject, I saw a poster of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, reading a newspaper, with his usual peaceful countenance. “Visualize World Peace,” the poster said. Since I was in the middle of composing my thoughts about consuming the news, I took this poster as a sign: Maybe it is possible to learn to consume the news in a peaceful, calm way.

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