Nothing.
If you’re a journalist, or an ardent consumer of news, you might disagree. New events are unfolding every single day, right in front of our eyes – you would say. Sure, there is truth in that, and yet, there is another way to look at News as Alain de Botton explains in his book The News: A User’s Manual.
De Botton shows that all news stories in the world could be categorised into certain archetypes, 32 to be precise. And that’s it. Any new story, when appears, can be seen as an addition to the contents of a particular archetype. To make matters clearer, let’s see some examples of these archetypes.
Celebrities doing normal things: Seeing our favourite actor at an airport, prime-minister meditating in his room, sports-star taking a stroll – all this helps us feel closer to these celebrities and gives us an escape from our mundane lives. The celebrities in these stories keep changing, but their effect on us does not.
Improvement in health: A new scientific breakthrough regarding a dangerous disease. A new vaccine for a deadly virus. A new medicine in market. There is something ‘new’ in each of these stories, but again, all of them point in one direction. That is, they give us hope of having a long and healthy life.
The same thing could be said about the news on terrorism, someone’s heroic accomplishment etc. The point is, once you identify the archetype, it does not matter how much content is in there. One can fill pages after pages, still, it would not add much value to our mind. Whether we read the news of two celebrities doing normal things or twenty, or two hundred, it is still the same story.
A terrorist attack going to happen somewhere; a regime is falling and a new one is ready to take over; a celebrity is saying something silly which is going to offend some people; a protest against a government is taking place. All of this has been going on and will go on with fresh characters on the scene. As a news consumer, therefore, you should not get overwhelmed with your daily information overload. After all, hardly anything new has happened, you’ve got to tell yourself.
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