Why Google News Is Turning Us All Into Anxious Goldfish With Attention Spans of a Gnat

Right, let’s have it out, shall we? I’m sitting here scrolling through Google News like some sort of digital archaeologist, digging through layers of catastrophe, celebrity gossip, and what appears to be seventeen different articles about a badger that got stuck in a Tesco, and I’ve had a proper realization: we’ve broken something fundamental about how humans are supposed to consume information, and nobody’s even pretending to fix it anymore.

Here’s the thing about Google News that absolutely does my head in — it’s not actually news anymore. It’s a slot machine designed by people who’ve never read an actual newspaper but have definitely studied how pigeons respond to intermittent rewards. You scroll, you get a hit of novelty, your brain releases a little dopamine, and suddenly it’s three hours later and you’ve absorbed precisely zero useful information but you’ve got an encyclopedic knowledge of which celebrity wore what to which thing.

The algorithm doesn’t care about what matters. It cares about what makes you stop scrolling. There’s a massive difference, innit.

What gets me is the sheer speed of it all. Back in the day — and I’m not even that old, mind you — you’d read the paper over breakfast, maybe listen to the news at ten o’clock, and that was your lot. You knew what was happening in the world. It was digestible. You could actually think about it. Now? Now we’re expected to maintain a real-time, constant awareness of everything, everywhere, all at once. It’s like being asked to watch seventeen telly programs simultaneously while someone keeps shouting plot twists at you.

And the worst part? We’re all just accepting this as normal.

The real scandal isn’t any individual story on Google News — it’s the structure of the thing. It’s designed to make us feel simultaneously informed and terrified. You see a headline about climate change, scroll past it in 0.3 seconds, then see one about a new TikTok trend, then something about a political scandal, then an ad for trainers you looked at once in 2019. Your brain’s doing laps trying to keep up, your cortisol’s through the roof, and you feel simultaneously like you’re missing something crucial and drowning in information you don’t actually need.

It’s mental, is what it is.

Here’s what really gets my goat though — and this is where I’m going to get a bit serious underneath the banter — we’ve outsourced our understanding of the world to an algorithm that has no stake in us actually understanding anything. Google News doesn’t care if you’re informed. It cares if you’re engaged. Those are completely different things, and we’ve somehow convinced ourselves they’re the same.

I think about something like youth-designed cities or healing-centered communities — proper, thoughtful approaches to how we build society — and I realize we’ll never get there if we’re all too frazzled by the news cycle to actually think about what kind of world we want to build. We’re too busy reacting to the next crisis headline to actually plan anything. It’s like trying to write a symphony while someone keeps throwing marbles at your head.

The fanzine culture of punk — now there’s something interesting. People made their own media because they had something to say, not because an algorithm told them they should. There was intention behind it. Community. Now we’re all just passive consumers of whatever the algorithm decides we should see, dressed up in the language of “personalization” and “relevance.”

And don’t even get me started on the homogenization of it. Google News shows you stories based on what you’ve already read, which means you end up in this little bubble where you only see the stuff you already agree with or are already interested in. It’s the opposite of actually understanding the world. It’s like eating the same meal every day and wondering why your palate’s gotten boring.

What I reckon we need — and this is my actual opinion, not just me having a moan — is a radical rethink of how we consume news. Not less information, mind you. Better information. Intentional information. Stuff that’s been properly reported, properly edited, stuff that respects your time and your intelligence.

We need news that’s designed for humans, not for engagement metrics. We need it to be slower, perhaps, but deeper. We need to remember that the point of journalism isn’t to create a constant stream of anxiety — it’s to help us understand what’s actually happening in the world so we can make better decisions.

Until we do that, Google News is just going to keep us all spinning in circles, scrolling like anxious hamsters on a wheel, feeling informed but understanding nothing, staying outraged but changing nothing.

And that, my friends, is the real tragedy of it all.