Graphic by Carlos Alberto Escobar

Earlier this month, I was very excited to find out that Hillary Clinton and Rafael aka Ted Cruz had won the Iowa caucuses. I was not happy because they are my preferred nominees, but because the beginning of the primaries is a step toward the end of the U.S. presidential election. After November 8, I’ll wake up to a newsfeed that is not hijacked by evidence of Donald Trump’s provocative stupidity, Cruz’s and Bush’s lousy Spanish and outrage about Hillary’s shady deals with the higher echelons of power in the United States. But November 8 is still 260 days away.

I have chosen not to follow this year’s race to the White House. There is no use getting invested in something that I have no control over. I am not a U.S. citizen: I cannot vote. Therefore, there are few real implications to my frustration, outrage or excitement about the candidates’ every move. Sure, I would like it if whoever is elected to sit in the world’s most powerful office wasn't a bigot, but hoping for the best is pretty much all I can do.

Staying away hasn’t been easy; these are arguably the most engaging, controversial and entertaining U.S. elections to date. Yet, I take it as a point of pride that I have not succumbed to the avalanche of world media coverage about the those aspiring to become the next Leader of the Free World. Staying up-to-date with Sanders, Clinton, Trump and Co.’s statements and whereabouts can be as exhausting and time-consuming as keeping up with Kanye and the Kardashians, and not nearly as rewarding. But my decision not to follow the elections was informed by things other than entertainment value. It is an attempt to counter the effects of the unhealthy dissonance between the things that pop up in my newsfeed and the realities and concerns of my everyday life.

Like many in this university, most of what I read online is determined by my Facebook feed. Some of this content is shared or recommended by friends, but most of it is made available by algorithms that study my friends' digital consumption and my own. Since this is a U.S. university, and many of my connections are rightfully concerned with what goes on in the United States, it is only natural that a lot of the content I am directed to is coverage of U.S. issues. However, most of these issues are not close to my heart and have little potential to impact my objective reality. Thus, I am often faced with a trade-off, since reading about U.S. issues and debates comes at the cost of being less informed about and invested in other issues that might be more pressing and more relevant to my daily life.

This is part of what Joichi Ito from the MIT Media Lab calls the caring problem. We all have a limited supply of time we can devote to following and becoming invested in what goes on in the world, and choosing to read one story means that we are also making a decision to ignore thousands of others. We do not do this maliciously, of course. In the current media world, it is easier to read about U.S. electoral politics than it is to read about the plight of Brazilian farmers, LGBTQ activists in China or the Colombian peace negotiations. However, problems arise when we only care about what our newsfeed says we should.

We must prioritize knowledge about our immediate realities, regardless of how many algorithms we have to fight in the process. Not doing so is running the risk of falling prey to the mirage of our digital existence. The battle is lost, for example, when we give precedence to U.S. issues because they are more readily accessible to us. We must strive to reclaim power over our digital ecosystems, and not forget about the issues that affect our immediate reality because we are too invested in what goes on in our U.S.-centric Facebook feed.