Do you ever feel like the avalanche of news paralyzes you instead of helping you understand? Do you think you can trust what you see and read when immediacy takes precedence over truthfulness? Do you think that the speed with which we consume and forget news weakens our individual and collective memory?

We do not intend to give closed answers, but rather invite people to ask themselves more questions about what they are shown, provoke critical thinking and generate awareness in the media environment we inhabit.

IN REAL LIFE is an Arena project, which was born at the beginning of 2024, in which we seek to understand how the media configure the reality in which we live to understand how we got here. In this fifth chapter, together with the cultural research laboratory Célula Lab, we explore how living surrounded by news, data, screens and messages not only informs us, but also saturates us. A saturation that influences how we understand what is happening around us and how we react or stop reacting to reality. These behaviors have a direct implication in the role we assume as citizens within the information ecosystem, whether when it comes to distinguishing what is true from what is false or when we have to decide what to share and what to trust.

Today, abundance is not just abundance, it is excess. In 2019 it would have taken more than 7 years to watch the entire combined catalog of Netflix, Amazon Prime and HBO. And if we printed all the content created on the Internet until 2016, it would take 23.8 million years to read it.

Our mind can no longer absorb, organize or discern everything that comes to us. What should expand our knowledge ends up eroding our clarity and our calm, because the body has limits and so does attention.

Excess information has consequences on our mental health and our collective health. According to the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 35% of Spaniards avoid the news and 36% do so for mental health. Furthermore, it is enough to observe the systematic repetition of violence in the media: homicides, kidnappings, armed conflicts, crimes, suicides… causing people to feel saturated and anesthetized, but at the same time restless in the face of so much noise that makes us lose meaning.

Psychiatrist Augusto Cury calls this phenomenon accelerated thinking syndrome: too many open mental windows, too many stimuli, too much speed for minds that need time and pauses to build judgment.

Without reflection there is no autonomy, no critical thinking, no conscious citizenship. We do not need to stop the world, but we do need to create refuges of slowness. Spaces to process, understand and decide. Intelligence is not in running, but in choosing when to stop.

Journalism was not born in a context of urgency. The first English newspaper, The Daily Courant (1702), fit on a single page and the advertising was on the back. Its director, Elizabeth Mallet, did not add opinion articles with observations about the news she published, since she assumed that her readers had the ability to reflect for themselves. Since then, technological acceleration has changed the information model.

From printing to radio, from television to the Internet and mobile phones, each advance has accelerated the production and consumption of news. Throughout the 20th century, with the introduction of radio and television, news could be broadcast in real time and evening editions or extra bulletins began to be distributed. In 1980, the first news channel in the US was created, CNN, and with it, 24-hour news broadcast. In the 90s, this “minute by minute” format was consolidated, and starting in 2007, the cell phone with a camera turned any citizen into a potential reporter. The instant and the speed are the usual tone.

Each advance has pushed the journalist to compete to be the first, even when “being the first” means being less rigorous. Currently, the news is born in X or on TikTok before in an editorial office. Verification arrives late and sometimes never arrives, causing truth, the heart of journalism, to compete with speed.

The social pact between media and audience is fractured. In this void, new mechanisms emerge: community notes, “I have detected an error” buttons, calls to viewers to verify events… So we are all co-responsible for how we construct our reality and that of others.

The goal of Arena is to continue exploring, because if we live in a world where speed is rewarded, our challenge should not be to “disconnect”, but rather to regain control to stop consuming information at the rate at which it is dissolved.

Clarity is also trained and, deep down, it is not about being connected to everything, but about connecting better. Not being the first to acquire the information, but being able to understand and process it. Not to add to the noise, but to choose what deserves our attention and our time.

Perhaps the key is to vindicate the need to think slowly, because without pause there is no good judgment, and without judgment we cannot construct a common truth based on criteria and rigor.