Alice: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
The Cheshire Cat: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
The New York Times ran a challenge in November, 2017 inviting teens to explore their relationships with news—they published the results February 1, 2018. If you’ve been reading my Friday Mindful Digital Life posts for a while, you know I have been exploring my own relationship to news. I’ve written about my personal experiment with a “News-Out” that I started in the summer when a Mindful Tech retreat I was scheduled to attend was cancelled. (If you missed those posts, you can catch up here, here, and here.) That self-organized experiment proved to be life-changing. Why? I think it was less about the experiment itself and more about the awareness I focused on my relationship with “news” combined with deep reflection on the choices I was making, and the habits I was enacting.
One of the challenge designers, Jihii Jolly, writes in a Medium post about the news challenge and her forthcoming book on the topic:
At the end of the day, if you don’t think about what nourishes your body, your mind and your relationships and you just scroll through whatever comes your way, you’re actually getting used to a certain set of perspectives without even realizing it.
Use the Challenge to launch a Weekly Family Technology Talk
Jihii Jolly and co-author Katherine Schulten have created an excellent resource for anyone engaged with news (and that’s just about all of us today, whether we want to be or not). If you haven’t started a weekly family technology talk, the News-Diet Challenge could be a great launching pad. I’ll summarize the steps below but please be sure to reference the lesson plan they created where they provide a News Audit chart and specific suggestions for each of the steps.
[Note: As always with my suggestions for conversations about technology, some may be more appropriate for conversations with tweens and teenagers. If you child is younger, use the suggestions as prompts for conversations with partners, co-parents, and parent friends.]
The challenge begins with this prompt:
Set the Stage: Think about what “news” means to you and what you want from it.
Next, students are invited to consider the role news has played in their lives up until this moment and to come up with specific examples.
Alone or in conversation with others, see if you can come up with an example for each of these…
- A memory from your childhood of hearing important breaking news, and its effect on you and those around you.
- A recent breaking news item that got your attention.
- A time when you were embarrassed not to know about something in the news.
- A time when you used news of some kind to help you in a practical way.
- A time when you felt a personal connection to news about a person, place, event or issue.
- A time you’ve shared a news item, whether via word of mouth, a social feed, email or in any other way.
- A time when news overwhelmed, angered or upset you.
- A time when knowledge of something in the news provided you with “social currency.” That is, your friends, family or community was interested in it, and knowing about it enriched your relationships or helped you build new ones.
Writers Katherine Schulten and Jihii Jolly follow this with another invitation:
You might also think about why you don’t want to follow news or what you are not interested in. Maybe you’ve avoided it because it can be overwhelming, because you don’t feel you have enough background knowledge to understand it, or because news right now can feel too divisive to discuss with your friends or family.
Then they present the 3 challenge steps:
Step 1: Do a news audit to see if your current news consumption habits are helping you fulfill your intentions.
Step 2: Change your news diet to make it meet your needs.
Step 3: Reflect on your experiences before and after you experimented with your news diet, and sum up how you see the role of news in your life now.
You can see what students who did the challenge had to say about what they learned here. If you try the challenge in your family, let me know how it goes. You can contact me using the form on the About page. I’d love to hear what you notice and discover as you bring mindfulness to your relationship with “the News.”
