尊敬的用户您好，这是来自FT中文网的温馨提示：如您对更多FT中文网的内容感兴趣，请在苹果应用商店或谷歌应用市场搜索“FT中文网”，下载FT中文网的官方应用。
I have something of a confession to make: I really love listening to the kinds of podcasts that, if they were titles in a bookshop, would be found in that most ugly-sounding of sections: “self-help”. I suppose I listen, on and off, to a good half-dozen or so of them — they keep me company when I’m doing chores, they motivate me, and they often give me fresh ways of thinking about my life (and even about some of the subjects I write on).
我有一个小小的坦白：我非常喜欢听那些在书店里会被归类为“自助”那一类的播客。我断断续续地听了大约六七个——它们在我做家务时陪伴我，激励我，并且常常带给我对生活的新思考（甚至是我写作的一些主题）。
But, in recent months, I have noticed a slightly troubling trend on these podcasts: many of them seem to be recommending that, in order to, you know, “live your best life”, you should switch off from the news entirely.
但是，最近几个月，我注意到这些播客中出现了一个略微令人担忧的趋势：许多播客似乎都在建议，为了‘过上最好的生活’，你应该完全远离新闻。
I should make it clear that I do not think we should all be the kind of “news junkies” who keep up with every incremental development of a story as if that were some kind of civic duty. At the risk of sounding like one of the self-help podcasters myself, feverishly following these “BREAKING NEWS” alerts as if they were goals in a football match is often simply an escape from dealing with the more complicated and fraught areas of one’s life.
我应该明确指出，我并不认为我们都应该成为那种对每个故事的每一步发展都保持关注的“新闻瘾君子”，好像那是某种公民责任。冒着听起来像自助播客的风险，狂热地关注这些“突发新闻”警报，就像关注足球比赛中的进球一样，往往只是为了逃避处理生活中更复杂、更棘手的领域。
But I do worry — and not just for the sake of my gainful employment — about what appears to be a broader switching off from what is going on in the world. A report published over the summer by Oxford university’s Reuters Institute found that a record high of 39 per cent of people worldwide say they sometimes or often actively avoid the news, up from 29 per cent in 2017.
但我确实担心——不仅仅是为了我的谋生——似乎有更多人对世界上正在发生的事情漠不关心。路透社研究所(Reuters Institute)今年夏天发布的一份报告发现，全球有39%的人表示他们有时或经常主动回避新闻，比2017年的29%有所增加，创下历史新高。
In Britain, the decline in engagement over the past decade has been especially staggering — 46 per cent now avoid the news, up from 24 per cent in 2017, while interest has also plummeted: just 38 per cent of Brits say they are “very” or “extremely” interested in the news, down from 70 per cent in 2015. In America, with its news-as-entertainment cable news culture, interest is a little higher, but it has fallen there too: from 67 per cent to 52 per cent over the same period.
在英国，过去十年中参与度的下降尤其惊人——现在有46%的人回避新闻，而2017年这一比例为24%，同时对新闻的兴趣也大幅下降：只有38%的英国人表示他们对新闻“非常”或“极其”感兴趣，而2015年这一比例为70%。在美国，由于其将新闻作为娱乐的有线电视新闻文化，人们的兴趣稍高一些，但在同一时期也有所下降：从67%下降到52%。
Social media platforms like X or TikTok tend to be the scapegoats for all the ills of my industry.
像X或TikTok这样的社交媒体平台往往成为我所在行业所有问题的替罪羊。
But engagement in the news on these sites is also falling: a recent survey by market research firm GWI found 35 per cent of Americans have reduced their social media consumption over the past three months, with almost half citing political discussions as the reason for pulling back, and 30 per cent saying political content “negatively impacts mental and emotional wellbeing”.
但这些网站上的新闻参与度也在下降：市场研究公司GWI最近的一项调查发现，35%的美国人在过去三个月里减少了社交媒体的使用量，其中近一半的人将政治讨论作为减少使用的原因，30%的人表示政治内容“对心理和情绪健康产生负面影响”。
That people should want to protect their mental health by switching off from the news sometimes is totally understandable. (I regard regularly switching off from the internet as a whole as an excellent idea, and undertake self-imposed digital detoxes myself.) And when the news is particularly distressing or frightening, avoiding it might indeed be helpful: a study conducted in the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic in the Netherlands found that news avoidance was associated with higher levels of perceived wellbeing.
人们有时候希望通过关闭新闻来保护自己的心理健康是完全可以理解的。当新闻特别令人痛苦或恐惧时，避免它可能确实有帮助：在荷兰进行的一项研究发现，新闻回避与更高水平的主观幸福感相关联。
But to disconnect from the news entirely is to suppose that someone else has done the work for you; that someone else can tell you what’s true and what’s false, who is right and who is wrong. It is also, in a democracy, to relinquish both the privilege and the responsibility of holding our leaders to account. How are we to ensure our nations are governed effectively, and that the right leaders get into power in the first place, if we know nothing of the candidates on offer, nor of the issues they propose to tackle?
但完全脱离新闻就等于假设别人已经为你做了这项工作；别人可以告诉你什么是真，什么是假，谁对谁错。在民主国家，这也意味着放弃了追究领导人责任的特权和责任。如果我们对候选人和他们提出的问题一无所知，我们如何确保我们的国家得到有效治理，并确保正确的领导人首先上台执政？
Our fractured, algorithm-driven attention economy has already made it difficult to agree on what is real and true. And while our much-maligned “mainstream media” institutions must certainly do better at pursuing objectivity, turning off from them can surely only make the prospect of common truths dimmer, while distortions in people’s perceptions of reality become more prevalent.
我们碎片化的、算法驱动的注意力经济已经让人们很难就什么是真实和真理达成一致。虽然我们备受诟病的“主流媒体”机构肯定需要在追求客观性方面做得更好，但是拒绝接受它们的影响只会让共同真理变得更加黯淡，同时人们对现实的看法扭曲也会更加普遍。
I was struck, recently, by a chart from Gallup, showing Americans’ perceptions of the state of crime at both a local and a national level. According to the FBI, violent crime fell by almost half between 1993 and 2022. While only 17 per cent in Gallup’s 2023 survey said the crime problem in their area was either “very” or “extremely” serious, almost four times as many — a record 63 per cent — said the same of the situation in America as a whole. Similar perception gaps can be seen in the way Americans view the state of their economy.
最近，我被盖洛普的一张图表所震撼，该图表显示了美国人对本地和全国犯罪状况的感知。根据美国联邦调查局(FBI)的数据，1993年至2022年间，暴力犯罪减少了近一半。在盖洛普2023年的调查中，只有17%的人表示他们所在地区的犯罪问题“非常”或“极其”严重，而近四倍的人（创纪录的63%）则表示美国整体状况如此。类似的感知差距也存在于美国人对经济状况的看法中。
Such distortions are all too easily exploited, of course, by people who deal in deliberate untruths, who sell them as facts — sometimes terrifying ones — and who offer simple, but wrong, solutions to them. In our utterly overwhelming world, disengagement from reality might seem like another easy answer. Alas, again, it is almost certainly not the right one.
当然，这种扭曲很容易被那些故意散布谎言的人利用，他们将谎言当作事实出售——有时是令人恐惧的事实——并提供简单但错误的解决方案。在我们这个不堪重负的世界里，脱离现实似乎是另一个简单的答案。唉，这几乎肯定不是正确的答案。