Suzanne Harrington: There's a lot to be said for a media blackout

I can’t process women dying in crushes outside Kabul Airport, or news of gay men being murdered by the Taliban - I’m on a crap holiday in the rain. 

'It’s not a lack of empathy. That would be easy.'

There’s a lot to be said for the August media blackout. For turning off, tuning out, dropping away from the endless pings, the head wrecking alerts, the relentless updates. Go away, we’re on holiday. 

Not even a proper holiday; more a damp tail-backed staycation to some godforsaken B-road beauty spot with a disappointing tea room doing overpriced scones and a gift shop last updated in 1953. 

I can’t process women dying in crushes outside Kabul Airport. I can’t process news of gay men being murdered by the Taliban. Of children’s lives and psyches being destroyed, being made into refugees again and again and again. Of savagery and power mania. I can’t process it. I’m on a crap holiday in the rain.

It’s not a lack of empathy. That would be easy. Lack of empathy would be a shrug, a distancing, a dismissive ‘oh well they’re far away / not like us, so they don’t matter’. But digital media doesn’t allow for that kind of distancing, does it, because the imagery is right here in your phone, the footage of other humans having their lives wrecked for mad, made-up reasons. 

The intimacy of seeing up close the suffering of others in the palm of your hand. What can you do about it from a caravan park on Craggy Island, other than feel it viscerally?

In the olden days, we consumed news like we consumed meals. Newspapers with breakfast, radio at lunch, nine o’clock news after dinner. This made it not more palatable – everything that led still bled – but it made it more digestible. 

We weren’t choking on 24 hour feeds. Our phones didn’t continually ping to tell us about children in Afghanistan, or robots on Mars.

Obviously, there is a need to know. Emphatically, we need to know. This is not nostalgia for a time when our news items were carefully selected, slanted and spun, and fed back to us promoting the agenda of billionaires; this still happens, just with tech overlords instead of newspaper barons. 

We have been taught to think of billionaires as godlike beings, rather than mad monkeys hoarding their bananas. Distraction has been weaponised, scapegoating normalised. So we talk about Love Island like it’s real, while blaming Abdul or Abiola for everything from the housing situation to low wages. 

And the barrage of updates – scandals, crises, disasters, all leading, all bleeding – continue to ping, distracting us from the only thing that really, really needs our full attention: climate change.

Meanwhile, huddled in a coat on a chilly naturist beach in Dorset, because all the non-naturist ones are full of staycationers, my phone pings to say that the naked baby from the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind, now 30 and living with his mum, is suing for the band for ‘child pornography’. 

On the beach, a middle aged man jogs along the tideline, flapping, as other men stand dotted about like exhibitionist meerkats. Ping! Willies. Ping! Rain. Ping! Crap scones. I put my phone on flight mode, and join the tailback home.