No comfort at the bottom of the feed: how to prevent information overload in the time of Covid
No comfort at the bottom of the feed: how to prevent information overload in the time of Covid
Experts explain techniques to navigate pandemic news so you can avoid being swamped while keeping up to date
There was a routine. Kate Sewell would watch the New South Wales premier’s daily Covid press conference at 11am. During the work day, she kept a browser tab running with a pandemic news live blog. She’d pick up her phone and scroll through posts about masks and lockdowns on social media. And then, on her drive home from her healthcare job in Sydney, maybe listen to a podcast or news radio.
She never felt exactly good when she turned off the TV or put down her phone, but maybe there was comfort in the noise. “It was the numbers game,” she says. “Are things going up? Are things going down? Chasing that hope that if the numbers are going down, OK, things are getting better.” The announcement in September that Gladys Berejiklian’s daily press conferences were coming to an end was “a hallelujah moment”, Sewell says.
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