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As I was looking into the psychological impact of news media (see DD178), I came across the work of Prof. Dr. Maren Urner, who is perhaps Germany’s leading academic in this field.
In this (German) presentation she talks about how our brains are biased towards negativity because prioritising potentially harmful information served our Neanderthal ancestors well. In today’s information environment, however, the constant flood of bad news leads to a phenomenon called ‘learned helplessness’: we become conditioned to believe that a bad situation is unchangeable, resulting in an unrealistically negative view of the world and a sense of permanent crisis.
Urner offers some strategies for combating the negativity spiral (e.g. developing a curiosity mindset), but instead of focusing on individual responsibilities, her work mostly raises awareness and calls for the widespread use of so-called ‘constructive journalism’.
“Constructive journalism is a response to increasing tabloidisation, sensationalism and negativity bias of the news media today. It is an approach that aims to provide audiences with a fair, accurate and contextualised picture of the world, without overemphasising the negative and what is going wrong.”
Importantly, this approach isn’t about avoiding ‘bad news’ or focusing on feel-good fluff pieces. As this short explainer video illustrates, the underlying principles of constructive journalism are three-fold: 1) Focus on solutions – don’t just expose problems but include potential solutions; 2) Cover nuances – avoid portraying issues as black or white but include the many shades of grey; 3) Promote democratic conversations – consider journalists not as aggressive prosecutors but unbiased facilitators that fuel curiosity and dialogue.
Journalism students have long been taught about the five Ws of a good story: who, what, when, where and why. Constructive journalism adds a crucial sixth one – ‘what now’ or ‘what next’ – which injects solution-oriented forward momentum to a story that, as research shows, leaves readers more engaged and with an increased sense of efficacy.
While this new-ish approach to journalism still needs a lot more and more prominent advocates to have real impact, as news consumers we can already approach our news diet with a ‘what now?’ mindset and seek out more constructive, more nuanced views and coverage by following solution-focused people/organisations.
Urner sums up her ‘pitch’ with a fitting quote by therapist and author Steve de Shazer: “Problem talk creates problems. Solution talk creates solutions.”
– Kai
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You receive this email because you subscribed to Dense Discovery, a weekly newsletter at the intersection of design, technology, sustainability and culture. Writing to you from Melbourne is Kai Brach. Do you have a product or service to promote in DD? Sponsor an issue or book a classified.
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Introducing WebrowseSPONSOR
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Turn any website collaborative instantly
Webrowse is a Google Chrome extension for co-browsing websites with your teammates and easy collaboration via a shared browsing window. Amplify your meetings with browser tabs synced in real-time and saved windows as workspaces to revisit later.
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Apps & Sites
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Reclaim helps you better manage your schedule with a range of smart features, such as syncing professional and personal calendars with options to hide specific details, automatically adding buffers to close events, reprioritising calendar events, suggesting time slots based on past routines.
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App subscription for Mac & iOS
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You pay a small monthly subscription fee and then get access to a large and growing catalogue of apps for your Mac and iOS devices, which includes classics like CleanMyMac, ClearVPN, Dropshare, and Ulysses. Proudly based in 🇺🇦 Ukraine.
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The Center for Humane Technology has just launched a new, free course for people involved in designing/developing tech: “This self-paced online course prepares product teams to create technology that treats attention and intention as sacred, protects well-being, and builds our collective capacity to address humanity’s most urgent challenges.”
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Take a walk down memory lane by listening to the AIM login sound or the noise of dot matrix printers. A cute side project by Brendan Chilcutt: “I launched the site in January of 2012 as a way to preserve the sounds made famous by my favorite old technologies and electronics equipment. For instance, the textured rattle and hum of a VHS tape being sucked into the womb of a 1983 JVC HR-7100 VCR.”
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Worthy Five: Kelly Riback-Small
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A concept worth understanding:
Dialectical thinking, which is an idea about integrating perceived opposites or contradictions to understand that they can be simultaneously true. In a climate of polarised socio-political discourse where we often find ourselves immovably attached to a single side of an argument, what would change with the nuance and radical acceptance inherent in this approach?
A question worth asking:
What small, incremental changes can we make in our everyday professional lives to push beyond business objectives and effect meaningful change in the world?
A video worth watching:
What if Money Didn’t Matter by the late philosopher Alan Watts (1915–73) urges listeners to dig for truth and fulfilment beyond the bottom line. The speech, to which I would add a caveat about privilege, is a nostalgic but timely reminder that the pursuit of purposeful work beyond capitalist ideals is a persisting theme.
A book worth reading:
A History Of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt is an intimate and poetic memoir that beautifully weaves together themes of grief, love, joy, sex and racial politics at the intersection of queerness and Indigenous life. Belcourt illuminates Canada’s legacy of colonial violence and powerfully shares that ‘happiness is the ultimate act of resistance’.
An Instagram account worth following:
@superniceletters is a Berlin-based lettering artist and illustrator serving stunning typography and crafting messages to keep us going in trying times.
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Books & Accessories
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The healing effects of gardening
Discover the profound mental health benefits that come from tending to a plot. “When we get our hands in the earth we connect with the cycle of life in nature through which destruction and decay are followed by regrowth and renewal. Gardening is one of the quintessential nurturing activities and yet we understand so little about it. The Well-Gardened Mind provides a new perspective on the power of gardening to change people’s lives.”
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How to think deeply again
A lot has been said and written about the attention crisis. Individual hacks like the ‘digital detox’ and the ‘no phones in the bedroom’ rule only get us so far. In his new book, Johann Hari explores how “our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces that have left us uniquely vulnerable to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention – and he discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong.”
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Overheard on Twitter
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Listening to 2 hours of waterfall audio at 3x speed so I become tranquil faster.
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Food for Thought
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In this short post, Lawrence Yeo manages to perfectly summarise my feelings about our productivity obsessed lives. “The fundamental tension is this: The more you view your time through the lens of productivity, the less you can see it through any other lens. Burnout is often associated with working too much, but the real reason it happens is because you have defined yourself by what you produce. It’s not just the exertion of energy spent during your working hours, but the exertion of thought spent during the time you’re not working.”
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Climate futurist Alex Steffen offers insightful and important writing on the climate crisis, but he’s often unnecessarily wordy for my taste and so I rarely read his essays in full. After a few recent conversations with friends about ‘how to prepare for our climate futures’, I resurfaced this piece on ruggedisation – the process of making the systems we rely on more durable, more flexible, more prepared for discontinuity. “As things fall apart, places that want to avoid falling apart with them will have to take bolder, faster actions. Ruggedization protects the system or place by building new systems to prepare it for a wider range of future conditions.”
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Paul Ford buys a synthesiser and discovers the Diderot effect (see DD143) along the way. A few months later and he’s no closer to making music but has gained a better grasp of the material waste of a new hobby that never was. “Each thing, each unit of stuff, came with its own, pet stuff – a stand, a foam cover, cords, a manual, a little drawstring case. The supply chain is fractal: Zoom in on your stuff and there’s more stuff, ad infinitum.” (Possible soft paywall)
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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It feels wrong featuring this under the ‘Aesthetically Pleasing’ title, but I wanted to include the photography of Emilio Morenatti somewhere in DD because his work moved me deeply. Morenatti is on the ground in Ukraine risking his life to bring us these profoundly moving photos.
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Geomorphological Landscapes is a popular Instagram account that collects unique geomorphology: landforms, their assemblages and surfaces.
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Saskia Freeke explores and experiments with generative patterns and animations and has shared one piece of art every day since January 2015.
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The design of Arek draws on extensive research in traditional manuscripts, exploring and emphasising the distinctive, calligraphic roots of Armenian. “Originally designed for school books, Arek equips the typographer with ten styles covering a wide range for editorial and other challenging typesetting environments. The family also provides expert features such as ligatures, lining and ranging figures, and contextual alternates.”
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Notable Numbers
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According to Airbnb, people from 165 countries have booked more than 430,000 nights at Ukrainian homes on Airbnb with no intention of using the rooms, but simply in order to donate money to the hosts.
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Of all virgin plastics produced to date, only around 9% has been recycled, 12% was incinerated, and 79% was accumulated in landfills or the natural environment.
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Since 2017, the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona has provided over 12,000 metropolitan tickets to those that gave up their private vehicle, allowing for unlimited and free use of public transport.
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Classifieds
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply or tweet at DD with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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