Categories: Articles

What Is The News Doing To Your Brain?

How often do you check a screen to see what’s going on in the news?

It’s probably a lot more often than you think. Consider your Twitter feed. Consider your Facebook timeline. Consider how many text message alerts you are signed up to receive. The list keeps growing, doesn’t it? CNN turned the news into a twenty-four hour cycle, and the Internet pushed it further into real time. Have you ever stopped to wonder just what, exactly, this constant barrage of news and information is doing to our brains and to our lives? Alain de Botton has thought about this. Deeply. If you have never heard of de Botton, there is no time like the present. He writes books and is often described as a modern day philosopher. He writes a lot, and has had enormous success as an author. He writes about everything from love and architecture to work and travel. He recently published a book called, The News – A User’s Manual, that looks at how much the news has changed, and how it has become as dominant in our society as religion once was (yes, this is deep stuff). In this fascinating talk at Google, he discusses some of the concepts in his book, while trying to explain how all of this news, everywhere, is impacting us as human beings.

This is an amazingly fascinating and engaging presentation…

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.