The Weight of the World

This week: has social media made the news too much for the human brain? Also: you’re not imagining it, the Tube really is getting louder; and some teeny tiny horses.

For perhaps a decade it’d be easy. The period in which I lived with someone who breathed Radio 4 in the way most of us breathe air blended seamlessly into the period when all you needed to know what was happening in the world was to be on the internet. I didn’t need to go looking for the news. I’d just kind of know it.

Among the many side effects of the death of Twitter and its mutation into X is that this is no longer true. The departure of large chunks of news media, plus the Musk-fuelled messing with the algorithm, means it’s much worse for news than it was, even if I wanted to hang out there, which I don’t. Bluesky has many advantages over what it’s replaced – but it’s a smaller pool, and the Nazis aren’t the only thing we’ve lost. I used to know what the big stories of the day were just by ambiently existing online. Now I have to go looking for them, checking the news pages, and forcing myself to seek out the radio news.

There’s a problem here – which is that I often don’t want to. Not just because I’m enjoying the music or the podcast I’d rather listen to instead, but because I quite literally don’t want to know. The war in Ukraine; the non-stop atrocities in Gaza; the twin nightmares of Donald Trump and incipient climate meltdown. Even here in Britain, there’s the depressing fact that the change government some of us naively imagined we’d elected too often seems determined to be no such thing. Quite often this year, for the first time in my adult life, I’ve had a strong urge to look away.

I’m not saying these stories don’t matter: I’m saying, if anything, the opposite. They all matter so much that the human brain can’t handle it. For most of human history, you’d have been aware of the news in your tribe or your village, and sometimes maybe word would filter through that a king or an emperor was dead, but that must have felt a long way away. Since the rise of mass media in the 19th century, though, there’s been a sense of a national conversation, of a wider world that matters to you. Indeed, that, transmitted first by newspapers and enabled by the railways, was one of the things that gave rise to the modern nation state.

Despite the greater immediacy of TV news, that was still how things felt well until the modern era. Places like Chechnya or Sarajevo or Kabul would pop up on the evening news; but they’d feel like by-words for wars or tragedies or atrocities, places in a drama, not somewhere where you might know people. As late as 2016, at the height of the Syrian War, I made an essay from facts about Aleppo, in an attempt to get past this sense of distance, and convince myself and my readers that it was a city, not an event.

By then, though, things were starting to change. Now we can hear the voices of those suffering, unmediated, undistanced. It’s impossible to maintain separation: everything now feels too close. Neville Chamberlain’s description of Czechoslovakia “as a far away country… of which we know nothing” has gone down in history as an obscenity, a way of covering for the fact he was throwing an ally to the Nazis in a doomed attempt to prevent war. But it also wasn’t entirely wrong. In 1938, Prague was far away. Most people did know nothing. That is no longer true: the whole world is just a click away. We know the people of Gaza or Kyiv. If you’re on the internet, it’s hard not to hear their voices.

But we can’t hear all their voices. The human brain isn’t set up for it. More than that, some wars inevitably make more noise, some voices shout louder than others, and there are plenty of places (Myanmar, Xinjiang, Sudan) I could have included in that list but didn’t, and which you likely wouldn’t have expected me to. There’s an argument, surely, that we should give these places the same attention: an atrocity is an atrocity, whether it shows up on our social media feed or not. But even on the best of days, an uncountable number of terrible tragedies are playing out. We surely can’t feel all of them as if they’re happening in the next village along. Can we?

I’m not sure what this means, for either the human brain or the world. But I’m not sure it’s a recipe for either sanity or justice.

No, you aren’t imagining it: the Tube is getting louder

I was trying to talk to someone on the tube the other day, on the Central line just west of Bethnal Green. “IT’LL QUIETEN DOWN IN A SECOND,” I yelled over the sound of a thousand banshees being fed simultaneously into a blender. The line curves sharply, after all, as it passes under Shoreditch, and such curves are frequently a source of screeching.¹ Once we moved onto the straighter section beyond Bank, I assumed, the line would quieten down, and we’d be able to chat. “JUST WAIT TIL WE’RE ROUND THIS BEND.”

As it turned out, though, we couldn’t, because it didn’t. In fact, now that I came to think of it, there were quite a lot of bits of Tube that had been making a noise recently, not all of which were in places where a line attempted a sudden right angle turn. I started to wonder if my hypothesis had been all wrong.

I had not entirely imagined this being a particularly nasty stretch: in 2018, research published by the BBC found that the line between Liverpool Street and Bethnal Green was the loudest on the network, peaking at “109 decibels – louder than a helicopter taking off nearby”. But the problem has both spread and become worse. A 2020 study found that “passengers are routinely and consistently subjected to sound pressure levels exceeding 80dBA [decibels], with levels sometimes reaching over 100 dBA”. In recent years, noise complaints have risen steadily, and last October, the BBC’s Tom Edwards measured the noise on the Tube for himself. “It peaks at 112.3 decibels (dB). A music concert has a sound level of 110 dB. A chainsaw operates at 120 dB.”

In 2023 the London Assembly’s environmental committee – then chaired by current Green party leadership candidate Zack Polanksi, a man about whom I am resolved to stop making cheap jokes, because who among us does not have embarrassing things in our past² – began warning about the risk to hearing. For most of us, this is probably overblown: although millions of passengers take the Tube every day, the worst noise tends to be fleeting, and anyway most of them are only underground for perhaps an hour a day. There is one group, though, who are underground for rather longer, because they’re driving the trains. There is no legal limit on the amount of noise a railway can expose those who staff or use it to. Unsurprisingly, the transport unions have demanded action.

So, you’re not imagining it: the Tube is getting worse. The question is why?

Firstly, let’s look at where the complaints are. Here’s a map: