Following the news closely can make us feel informed while leaving us without the context needed to understand what we’re seeing. Deeper landmarks help us connect events into a larger picture and keep our bearings in the endless news cycle.

Is the person who follows the most news necessarily the most informed?

We tend to assume that more news creates a clearer picture of the world. But someone can closely follow every new development while losing sight of the larger story connecting them.

Philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellul gives this condition a memorable name in his book Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes:

“This situation makes the ‘current-events man’ a ready target for propaganda. Indeed, such a man is highly sensitive to the influence of present-day currents; lacking landmarks, he follows all currents. He is unstable because he runs after what happened today; he relates to the event, and therefore cannot resist any impulse coming from that event. Because he is immersed in current affairs, this man has a psychological weakness that puts him at the mercy of the propagandist. No confrontation ever occurs between the event and the truth; no relationship ever exists between the event and the person. Real information never concerns such a person.”

Current-Events Man sees every event, but he cannot see the current.

That doesn’t mean he is uninformed. He may even know more details about the latest news story than the average person. The problem is that all this information never gets integrated into a wider map of reality.

He has a worldview built from headlines, without deeper historical or philosophical anchors. When the headlines change, his picture of the world changes with them.

When the News Feed Erases the Past

As soon as the next story breaks, the previous story becomes yesterday’s news, never to be revisited.

Today’s news can get memory-holed quickly, not just through censorship or deletion, but simply by being crowded out by the next shiny thing. There’s a reason “Friday news dumps” exist: damaging information is released when fewer people are paying attention, in the hope that the weekend will bury it before Monday. Current-Events Man is especially vulnerable to this.

Current events feel immediate and important. This taps into our recency bias: our tendency to give more weight to new information. That sense of urgency narrows our field of vision. We focus on the latest scandal or spectacle while losing the history, institutions, and recurring patterns underneath it.

Media researchers distinguish between two broad ways of framing the news:

• Episodic framing: “What happened today?”
• Thematic framing: “What keeps happening – and why?”

Episodic framing comes naturally to the daily news cycle. Every new event gives us something immediate to discuss with family, friends, coworkers – or argue about on the internet.

Current-Events Man asks, “What is everyone talking about today?” and jumps right in. He rarely steps back to connect one event to the next or ask the deeper question: “How did we even get here?”

The Feeling of Being Informed

In the feed era, Current-Events Man doesn’t believe he needs to seek out every story himself. He trusts that major stories will show up in his social media feeds or be mentioned by friends. Researchers call this the “news-finds-me perception”: the belief that anything important will eventually reach us.

One 2026 study of South Korean internet users found that incidental exposure to news on social media was associated with a stronger news-finds-me perception and a greater feeling of being informed. However, when participants took a short quiz about politics, how informed they felt didn’t match their objective knowledge.

The feed can increase the feeling of being informed without reliably increasing knowledge.

Passive news consumption doesn’t always look passive. Current-Events Man may refresh his feed constantly, skim dozens of headlines, and argue online. He is active in the conversation while remaining a spectator in society.

Without a wider worldview, news can become little more than entertainment. Another form of bread and circuses. The feed decides which events Current-Events Man sees, how they are framed, and what lessons he takes away from them – if any.

Build Landmarks

Current events aren’t necessarily bad inputs. They’re just incomplete without context. They tell us where to look, but not necessarily what we’re looking at.

We need deeper inputs to supply the missing landmarks. When a current event catches your attention, ask yourself:

• History: What came before this? What led up to it?
• Pattern: Does this keep happening? What earlier events resemble it?
• Structure: What institutions and incentives helped produce it? What keeps it going?
• Follow-through: What happened after everyone stopped watching? How did it actually turn out?

These landmarks help you place events inside a longer timeline and keep your bearings in the endless news cycle.

You don’t need to abandon current events. Just complete them.

The post Current-Events Man: Lost in the Endless News Cycle appeared first on The Emotion Machine.

AI can brainstorm, research, edit, and rehearse alongside you — but only you can answer the question that actually matters: is this still yours? Here’s how to make AI a real creative partner instead of a shortcut around your own creative process.

“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”

This is Melvin Kranzberg’s First Law of Technology. The important part is that last phrase: “nor is it neutral.” As technology advances, it changes our world and reshapes the environment around us in ways that can’t simply be undone. Once a new technology becomes part of society, we don’t go back to the world that existed before it. From the printing press to television to the internet, every major technology has reshaped how people think, communicate, create, and organize their lives.

Artificial intelligence is just the latest iteration of this. Creativity is one area where that change is already causing major friction.

AI-generated work has created serious ethical concerns across writing, art, music, and other creative fields. It has lowered barriers to producing professional-looking work, while also raising legitimate concerns about the careers and livelihoods of creative professionals. When someone can write a couple sentences, click a button, and generate an entire book, there’s good reason to worry about fraudulent and deceptive uses of AI as a creative tool.

There are broader political and economic questions surrounding AI, which are beyond the scope of this article, but for now I want to focus on how individual creators can use these tools ethically and productively.

There is an important difference between asking AI to create something for you and using AI to help you create something yourself. AI can be a valuable creative partner, but it shouldn’t become a creative replacement.

The Agency Question: Is This Mine?

For creative people who choose to use AI, one important question to ask yourself is: “Is this mine?”

Does the finished work still reflect your ideas, taste, judgment, and creative intentions? Or has AI started making the important creative decisions for you?

This isn’t a perfect test. Personal integrity is always a factor. Someone may give AI a single page full of instructions and think, “This is mine.” Ultimately, you have to draw that line for yourself and be honest about how much of the finished work actually reflects your own creative vision.

The truth is creativity has always involved outside influences, feedback, editors, collaborators, mentors, and tools. What matters is whether you still feel a genuine sense of authorship over the final result.

AI should help you explore and develop your creativity, not outsource the creative process. There are many ways to use AI while still remaining the person in charge of the work.

Ways to Use AI as a Creative Partner

• Brainstorming – AI can be a useful sounding board for kicking around new ideas, asking questions, playing devil’s advocate, exploring different directions for a current project, or thinking out loud through voice chat. At this stage, you don’t need to worry about answers. Just have a conversation that helps you clarify your thoughts and vision.
• Research / Learning – AI is a powerful research assistant for finding articles, press releases, scientific studies, and other useful information on almost any topic. It can help you stay up to date on current news and developments in your field, point you toward new research avenues, and break down complex material into something easier to understand, including summarizing longer studies and tracing information back to original sources.
• Planning / Organization / Goal-Setting – AI can help you turn a messy vision into a clear plan of action. It can break down a large project into smaller, more manageable steps, including setting specific goals and deadlines. From there, it can help you decide what deserves your attention next and keep the broader direction of the project in view. Uploading your raw notes and other relevant material can keep AI on the exact same page as you as the project develops.
• Design / Concept Art – AI can help you visualize a project before committing to any final decisions. You can generate rough mock-ups or placeholders for things like business logos, web designs, book or album covers, and other visual branding. You can also brainstorm on a visual level by creating concept art or storyboards, or communicate information more clearly through flowcharts, diagrams, and infographics. Once you’re ready to do the work yourself or hire a professional, you already have a clearer visual direction to work from.
• Editing / Refining – AI can serve as a personal editor when writing. At the most basic level, it can identify spelling and grammatical errors just like any other spellcheck tool. But it can also look at your work as a first-time reader and help you refine your language, catch awkward phrasing and unnecessary repetition, or identify places where your writing loses consistency or flow.
  

• Coding / Debugging – AI can make basic coding and technical problems easier to understand and fix, especially if you don’t have a strong programming background. I’ve used it for small fixes on this website, including design changes and troubleshooting problems I’d otherwise need outside assistance with. For creative people, this can remove a lot of the technical friction that normally gets in the way of building something online. For experienced programmers, it can speed up routine work by streamlining simpler coding tasks and generating rough code they can refine themselves.
• Feedback / Testing – AI can provide surprisingly human-like feedback, as if you were asking a friend for a second opinion on something you’ve made. You can share your writing and ask, “Where does this chapter lose momentum?” send a link to your website and ask, “What would a first-time visitor think this is about?” or upload a song and ask, “What genre best describes this?” This can help you spot weak spots, confusing sections, or unintended impressions that are difficult to notice when you’ve been immersed in a project for too long and need a fresh set of eyes. AI can often articulate a problem that other people sense but don’t quite know how to explain.
• Rehearsal / Role-Playing – AI can simulate another person so you can practice situations before experiencing them for real. You can rehearse job interviews, presentations, pitches, or other professional conversations, which can be especially useful for creatives trying to communicate their work or break into an industry. Through voice chat, you can actually run through these scenarios and practice your delivery in real time. On the creative side, you can test fictional dialogue, interview your own characters, role-play scenes from a book, film, TV show, or video game, or gauge how different audiences might respond to your work.

Give AI Better Inputs

Don’t treat AI like a blank search box where you just enter isolated prompts. Like any creative partner, it works better through an ongoing back-and-forth and a shared understanding of what you’re trying to create.

Before asking AI to do anything, explain your project, upload any relevant work or notes, and define your specific goals. You can also share constraints, examples of what you like, previous decisions, or ideas you’ve already rejected. The goal isn’t simply to give AI more information, but better information that’s relevant to your work. The richer the shared context, the easier it is for AI to stay on the same page as you and give responses that actually fit the project.

By creating dedicated projects and sharing relevant files, you can also jump back into your work without needing to reexplain everything from scratch. That continuity is one of the main reasons AI can become a useful long-term creative partner.

Of course, more context doesn’t mean blindly uploading everything. Some creators may be uncomfortable sharing unpublished or proprietary work because of concerns about how AI companies store or use their data. Know the policies of the tools you use and decide what you’re comfortable sharing.

AI Is Just One Feedback Loop

AI can be a powerful tool, but don’t forget that it’s just one feedback loop in the creative process.

Creative work already runs on multiple feedback loops: your own judgment → collaborators → friends → editors → beta readers → audiences → revision. AI simply adds another source of input.

Both human and AI feedback have weaknesses, so it’s best to set up a system of checks and balances between the two. Double-check facts and compare different perspectives before taking any one piece of feedback as gospel.

Ultimately, you may take in feedback from a variety of sources, but you still put the final stamp of approval on the work.

The post AI as a Creative Partner: How to Use AI Without Outsourcing Your Creativity appeared first on The Emotion Machine.

Digital tools make it easy to capture and store information before we have really processed it. But once the device has it, the mind may quietly let it go.

As soon as we come across an interesting article or study, we can bookmark the link, screenshot the abstract, or add it to a future reading list.

But how often do we actually return to what we save? Collecting information can create the illusion of learning without requiring us to absorb or reflect on it. In an online world already flooded with information, we end up reproducing that same overload inside our own devices.

A 2026 study published in Memory & Cognition shows one potential cost of trying to digitally capture everything we find interesting. Across seven different experiments involving 892 participants, researchers consistently found that people remembered screenshotted images worse than images they simply viewed.

In the basic experiment, participants viewed 44 pieces of art on their own phones. Each piece was randomly assigned either a “view” or “screenshot” instruction. Participants moved at their own pace and weren’t told that a memory test was coming. After a ten-minute coloring task, they were shown each original artwork alongside two similar images and asked which one they had seen. Despite seeing only 44 images, participants recognized fewer than 60 percent of the screenshotted images on the later memory test. For context, earlier research using a similar recognition test found 87 percent accuracy after people viewed 2,500 images.

The exact mechanism is still unclear, but one possible explanation is divided attention. The moment we decide to take a screenshot, we are no longer simply observing the information. We are observing and documenting it at the same time. Even if the interruption lasts only a second, part of our attention shifts toward preserving the information rather than actively processing it.

The screenshot enters your phone, but it doesn’t necessarily enter your mind.

When Our Devices Remember for Us

This pattern is often called digital amnesia: the information is preserved on a device but remembered less clearly by the person who saved it. The act of saving may become an automatic cue to mentally disengage. The phone has it now, so our brains don’t have to hold onto it anymore.

It’s similar to how most of us no longer know anyone’s phone number by heart. Once a number is stored in our contacts, we can tap a name and let the phone remember it for us.

Digital amnesia isn’t limited to screenshots. In one museum-tour study, participants remembered fewer photographed objects, fewer details about them, and less about where they were located than objects they simply observed. Interestingly, the impairment disappeared when participants zoomed in on one specific detail, perhaps because the added focus encouraged deeper engagement.

The image itself may not be the problem. What matters may be whether taking it deepens our attention or divides it between observing the moment and documenting it.

Anyone who has watched a table pause to photograph dinner before taking a bite has seen this divide in miniature. Sometimes we take a picture to preserve a memory. Other times we are already imagining how the experience will look to other people online. Part of our attention shifts from living the moment toward turning it into content.

We keep trying to preserve life without fully processing or experiencing it.

The same pattern applies to the information we collect online. A growing archive can feel like a growing body of knowledge, even when very little has been absorbed. Saving articles and links without revisiting them is like filling a bookshelf but never reading a single page.

Actively Process What You Save

This doesn’t mean saving information for later is inherently harmful. In another study, older adults who reviewed photographs captured automatically by wearable cameras recalled more details from an earlier event than those who reviewed photographs they had taken themselves. Our devices can serve as an extension of memory, preserving ideas and experiences we might otherwise lose.

The real problem is capture without review: collecting information without actively engaging with it or digesting what it means.

Instead of reflexively taking a screenshot or bookmarking a link, write down the core idea in your own words. The extra effort matters: it forces you to decide what is worth remembering before moving on. Try explaining it, connecting it to something you already know, discussing it with someone, or putting it into practice. Each step shifts us from merely storing information to actually learning from it.

Technology makes it easy to collect more inputs than we can meaningfully process. But what we gain from an input depends partly on the quality of attention we bring to it. Better inputs still need to be psychologically digested. Otherwise, even good information becomes another form of digital clutter.

The post Digital Amnesia: Why Saving Information Is Not the Same as Learning It appeared first on The Emotion Machine.

Civic life depends on more than paying attention. The way we participate – or don’t – shapes who actually has influence.

Pericles once told his fellow Athenians that a man who stays out of politics isn’t simply minding his own business, but is failing in his duty to the community. Civic disengagement wasn’t seen as neutral because everyone else had to live with the consequences of an apathetic populace.

Yet nearly two-thirds of Americans today are, in some sense, just watching civic life happen. We may follow the news, argue about politics at the dinner table, and react to every new controversy on social media, but none of that necessarily translates to real-world action.

Be honest: when’s the last time you voted, donated to a cause, showed up at a town hall, or volunteered through a church or community group?

People engage with civic life in very different ways. A new Pew Research Center study divides Americans into four broad groups based on how they participate in politics, civic life, religion, and the news: Mobilizers, Connectors, Spectators, and Outsiders. Here’s a visual breakdown of its findings:

These categories show that civic engagement is not simply a matter of being “involved” or “uninvolved.” Each group reflects a different relationship with public life: trying to change it, helping hold it together, watching from the sidelines, or withdrawing from it entirely.

Mobilizers (9%): The People Who Show Up

Mobilizers are the smallest group, but they do the most. They are the ones calling representatives, joining campaigns, and volunteering when a cause needs votes, money, or sustained political pressure.

• 87% voted in 2024
• 77% volunteered during the past year
• 73% belonged to a group or organization
• 65% contacted an elected official
• 21% volunteered for a political campaign

They may be a small minority, but they are the people most likely to channel their beliefs into organized pressure and real-world action.

Connectors (28%): The People Who Hold Communities Together

Connectors are involved too, but their attention is usually on sustaining and strengthening existing networks rather than building new ones. They are less interested in political combat on the front lines and more likely to support the institutions that make community life possible.

• 90% donated to a nonpolitical cause
• 87% voted in 2024
• 65% belonged to a group or organization
• 43% attend religious services at least monthly

While Mobilizers try to move society in a new direction, Connectors often keep society from falling apart.

Spectators (31%): The People Who Watch From the Sidelines

Spectators may know more about the daily news than people who are actively involved in their communities. They follow events closely, discuss them often, and stay emotionally plugged in, but most of that engagement never leaves the screen.

• 84% follow national news at least somewhat closely
• 75% liked or saved a news post in the past week
• 17% volunteered
• 10% belonged to a group or organization

Spectators often confuse having a reaction to society with having a role in it. Much of their participation remains limited to liking posts, sharing articles, arguing in comment sections, and other forms of slacktivism on social media.

Outsiders (31%): The People Who Have Checked Out

Outsiders participate at relatively low levels across almost every area Pew measured. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are lazy or apathetic. They may be politically exhausted or deeply distrustful of institutions. Or there may simply be fewer organizations, churches, clubs, or local groups pulling them into civic life.

• 41% voted in 2024
• 41% follow national news at least somewhat closely
• 24% attend religious services at least monthly
• 13% volunteered

Checking out may protect people from political exhaustion, but it also leaves public life increasingly shaped by those who remain organized, committed, and active.

The Activated Minority

Mobilizers are not only the most active group – they are also the most emotionally charged. Sixty percent say they often feel angry about the state of the country, while 56% often feel fearful. Among Outsiders, both figures fall to 36%.

This emotional intensity is what drives Mobilizers to act. People rarely organize, protest, donate, campaign, or pressure institutions because they feel mildly concerned. They act because they believe something important is threatened, broken, or urgently in need of change.

The fact that Mobilizers make up 9% of Americans creates a striking parallel with the “tipping point” theory of social change, which suggests that a committed minority of roughly 10% may be enough to spread a new belief or norm through the wider population.

One influential 2011 study (PDF) found that once a committed minority reached about 10%, the time required for its opinion to spread across a social network dropped dramatically. The key was not merely holding a belief, but remaining unwavering, repeatedly advocating for it, and resisting pressure to conform.

The comparison is not exact. Pew’s Mobilizers are not one unified movement pushing the same cause, and the 10% finding came from a theoretical model of social networks. Still, the parallel is worth noticing: a relatively small but committed minority can exert influence far beyond its numbers.

Not everyone with influence is a Mobilizer. Many celebrities and online personalities operate inside an influencer silo, where they generate enormous attention without producing much change beyond their existing audience. Their followers react, share, and reinforce one another, but the influence remains socially contained. Mobilization begins when attention crosses group boundaries and starts changing what people actually do.

A Nation of Spectators

That leaves most people on the other side of the equation.

The Pew survey uses “Spectators” to describe one specific group, but spectatorship may be a much broader condition of modern life. We increasingly experience society through screens, commentary, clips, and reactions rather than through direct participation in institutions and communities.

In today’s environment, politics becomes nothing but content to consume, another source of entertainment. We watch speeches in clips, experience protests through livestreams, and follow current events through people reacting to other people’s reactions. Spectatorship can start to feel like participation, even when nothing is being asked of us beyond attention. Many people treat politics more like a reality TV show than a democratic process with real-world consequences. The more drama, the better.

Ask yourself: “Am I participating in society or just watching?”

You don’t have to see yourself as a “political person” to play a role in your community. Civic life isn’t only elections and protests. It’s also the parent who attends a school meeting or the neighbor who volunteers at a food pantry. It can be the church member organizing a fundraiser or your coworker keeping the local softball league going.

A healthy democracy depends on people showing up, yet it’s easy to check out and hope someone else fixes things.

Perhaps societies are rarely changed by the majority. They are changed by the most committed minority. Most people don’t set the new norm. They adapt to it once it takes hold.

The post 4 Types of Civic Engagement: Are We Participating in Society or Just Watching? appeared first on The Emotion Machine.

Flooding the zone isn’t about making you believe one lie. It is about overwhelming the information environment until truth itself feels impossible.

The most effective propaganda does not always tell you what to believe. Sometimes it leaves you unsure whether belief is possible at all.

A few years ago, I wrote about information pollution and how unreliable content poisons the internet as a shared resource. “Flooding the zone” is a more deliberate version of the same problem: contaminating the well until people begin to doubt that clean water exists anywhere.

A recent review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences calls attention to this broader strategy: misinformation can create epistemic overwhelm, erode shared reality, and damage our shared sense of truth even when no single false story wins out.

Saturation: Overwhelm the Mind

Flooding the zone means filling the information environment until no single story can rise above the noise. The truth doesn’t matter, just overload.

When a breaking news story first hits, claims, counterclaims, rumors, half-truths, edited clips, and endless speculation go into the pot, creating confusion.

Contradiction is not a weakness. It’s a strength. One person says the event was an accident. Another says it was planned. Someone else says it never happened. A fourth claims all the evidence was generated by AI. These stories cannot all be true, but together they can still achieve something: overwhelm and disorient you.

On social media, multiple narratives are built in parallel through influencer circles, algorithmic amplification, and targeted bot campaigns. Most of these narratives jump out in front of the facts so they can start shaping public opinion before the dust has settled. Sometimes the flood is deliberately created to obscure the truth. Other times, the incentives of the internet reproduce it automatically in the chase for likes and attention. It doesn’t matter if something is real, only if your audience wants to believe it.

Bots and generative AI take this to another level. A 2025 study analyzing Twitter conversations around major global events estimated that about 20% of the chatter came from bots. Perhaps the “Dead Internet Theory” is becoming a little more true every day. AI can generate unlimited text, images, audio, and video at low cost, then personalize those messages to appeal to different audiences.

Flattening: The Erosion of Shared Reality

The flood flattens the difference between reliable and unreliable information until everything starts to look the same.

Scientific studies become memes. News articles circulate as screenshots stripped of context. Influencers speak with the same confidence as experts. Everything becomes infotainment, with a stronger emphasis on entertainment than information.

The information pyramid is a guide for deciding what types of information deserve more weight than others. But social media compresses that pyramid into a flat feed. A scientific study, an anonymous screenshot, an influencer rant, and a meme all begin competing on the same level.

Truth, half-truth, and fiction flow through the same current until they become hard to distinguish.

That pushes competing narratives into separate silos, where each group believes its version of the truth is correct and everyone else is delusional or living in a different reality altogether.

Of course, people can disagree over values while sharing basic facts. But once each group has its own version of reality, disagreement becomes almost impossible to resolve. We are no longer arguing about what events mean. We are arguing over whether the events happened at all.

Surrender: When Truth Feels Impossible

Once you’ve been overwhelmed and disoriented, the final stage is epistemic nihilism: the belief that nothing can really be known.

You start thinking, “Everyone lies.” “Everything is propaganda.” “No one knows anything.”

This can sound like healthy skepticism at first, but it eventually becomes an excuse to stop trying to discern the truth. Skepticism searches for better evidence. Epistemic nihilism gives up on evidence entirely and asks, “Why bother?”

The result is “truth decay,” where facts and evidence matter less and every claim starts to feel like just another opinion. Trust drops across the board, including in the people and institutions we rely on for accurate information. Now it feels like there is nowhere left to turn, no reliable way to tell what’s up from what’s down.

Cynicism becomes both a symptom and a defense mechanism: people retreat into disbelief because caring, investigating, and being wrong or misled have become exhausting.

A person who believes nothing is not protected from propaganda. They are often easier to manipulate, because they have lost the standards needed to distinguish one claim from another.

Here’s how the progression plays out:

You need to monitor your information environment more carefully than ever, or chances are you’re being pulled down one rabbit hole or another. Being aware of information pollution isn’t enough. We also need to create better digital environments by keeping a close eye on our feeds and sources.

The flood does not need to convince you of one story. It only needs to make every story feel questionable.

The post Flood the Zone: How Misinformation Makes Truth Feel Impossible appeared first on The Emotion Machine.