Kate Hawkesby: Less the misinformation, and more information overload that's the problem

I’m not worried about Elon Musk buying Twitter because it’s a waste of energy. I’ve decided the only real currency we have these days is our energy; expend it at your peril. Think long and hard about what you give it to. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. People expend too much energy these days on stuff that isn’t real, doesn’t matter, will possibly never impact them. Don’t like Twitter? Hop off it. Delete it. Hate Facebook? Get off it. I’ve done both. It’s liberating. I don’t expend energy on it at all. My only social media outlet is Instagram, I gleefully hit the block and delete button for trolls. Why let them take up space in your head, or take up your energy and time? Pointless. If social media’s not fun or safe or informative, why bother? It seems though, that many of us do get worried about what we see online, or what others may be seeing online. Increasingly, the concern is misinformation and disinformation. I do wonder by the way, to what degree the people who're worried about this from a personal point of view, don’t understand how algorithms work, don’t know they’re being targeted with their news and stories, don’t realise they’re in an echo chamber, don’t realise they can control what they see and read with the click of a button. They’re probably also the same people who read the comments section. Again, a giant waste of energy. Since when do you care what a bunch of strangers on the internet think? Do you stop people in the street and ask them what they're thinking? Does the opinion of some random you’ve never met and ever will again, really concern you? And what can you do about it? Nothing. So why waste energy on it? Anyway, this National Security Long Term insights survey showed one in four Kiwis are worried about misinformation online. They see it as “the greatest threat to them and their families.” So 25 percent of us are worried about national security. How would we ever really know the ins and outs of our national security anyway? Let's be honest. How much is us worrying about it going to change it? The PM thinks misinformation is “impacting our liberal democracies”. I can think of a lot of things impacting our liberal democracy here in New Zealand and misinformation would not be top of my list. The Government’s peddling of it might be though. But this is what I mean. Who to trust? We’ve developed a healthy cynicism about the media by now, surely, and politicians. Do we really take at face value everything we see and hear? I get that misinformation can be dangerous and take people down a rabbit hole. Most sensible people with their wits about them though won’t go down these rabbit holes. I’m talking about the stuff you can control. Knowing the algorithms you’re a part of, or at least acknowledging they exist. Questioning what you’re fed online, deleting or getting rid of stuff that doesn’t sit quite right with you. If your media feeds are stressful, get rid of them. Is it possible that more of this stuff than we realise is actually within our control? Surely it’s liberating to just worry about what you can control, and forget the rest? It’s less the misinformation I’m worried about personally, and more the information overload that I think’s the problem.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.