Same old story: bad news sells.

Today, I came across a Brand Republic article with the headline "Online spending figures tumble as financial crisis starts to bite." The article goes on to explain how online spending has grown by 14.8% last month (that is, the amount of money that consumers are spending online— not, as you might assume from a source that describes itself as "the place to find all about the UK marketing, media and communications industries", the amount of money being spent in online advertising.)

It reminded me of something I posted about six months ago about house prices, and the way that the media reports bad news out of all proportion to good news; 12 months ago, the story was that house prices were falling, in the sense that they were rising slower than they had for a few years. Obviously, this created fear amongst those who were thinking of investing money in properties. Then a few months later, the new story was that house prices had stopped rising. Then the story was that prices were falling. All of which creates more fear in the market; buyers were worried about whether they should invest; sellers were worried about whether they would be able to find a buyer. Obviously, this is just the negative part of a continuous cycle; at the other end should come a point where property prices will have dropped to less than their value, and it will become a brilliant time to buy again (and we'll be back to reading stories about mercenary property developers making small fortunes for no work by butchering period houses and turning them into laminate floored, spotlit flats…) But it's hard to focus on that positive side of the story if you're immersed in headlines about doom and gloom.

Anyway, this seems to be the same old story. Given the choice of reporting what's happening right now ("Online spending figures still rising", for example— maybe even "…in the face of financial crisis"), or putting a "credit crunch/financial crisis doom and gloom" spin on them, 9 times out of 10 it's the bad news that makes the headlines.

This year, more money than ever will be spent Christmas shopping online— an eMarketer report forecasts that online holiday sales (excluding travel) will total $32.1 billion, up 10.1% over 2007. But because online shopping and internet usage are approaching their limits (you'll never have 100% of all shopping online, or more than 100% market penetration— whatever "mobile experts" tell you), the bad news is that they aren't growing as fast as they were last year. (Which was also true last year, but the media mindset wasn't quite as pessimistic as it is right now.) So that's the headline I'm guessing you'll be seeing over the next few months; good news disguised as bad news, compounding the cycle of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

All this is coming at a time when there is more information than ever available to us, and the tendancy to surf over information rather than deep-diving into it is fundamentally changing our relationship with information. Nicholas Carr recently wrote an article for The Atlantic entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", which has prompted a considerable amount of debate (online, naturally…) on the subject.

Just as Marshall McLuhan predicted back in the 1960s, digital communication is changing the dynamic of media from being a vast Alexandrian library— a static repository of the world's information— into a dynamic, ever-changing mechanical brain; where before a whisper might start a chain of chinese whispers, now we hear a simultaneous, deafening choir of whispers;

So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.

But maybe the more worrying aspect is that the busier and more important you are, the greater the likelihood that the headlines will be as far as you will get in news reporting— while at the same time, being responsible for putting the reports into the proper context/perspective, and figuring out how to deal with them.

That's the real story that I'm feeling pessimistic about…