One January nearly 250 years ago, Bengal saw the publication of India’s first newspaper, Hicky’s Bengal Gazette. Its life was cut short merely two years later because the British found its coverage difficult to digest. Some 80 years later, far away from Bengal, in the land of another colonising power, newspapers were giving Charles Baudelaire indigestion too. The French poet could barely bring himself to touch a newspaper and described it as “a tissue of horrors” guaranteed to poison the spirit.
Although he did not have the vocabulary to describe what later philosophers would call the ‘organisation of attention’, Baudelaire grasped the phenomenon intuitively. The newspaper disturbed him because it did two things at once — it stored, transmitted and shaped collective experience, but it also impeded individual attention. Strikingly, this anxiety is shared by the contemporary French philosopher, Bernard Stiegler, only about present-day digital media. He argued that the digital feed externalises memory while simultaneously weakening the capacity to reflect on it. The 19th-century newspaper did exactly this. It allowed a city to remember itself day by day, even as it trained readers to forget yesterday’s paper without regret. Baudelaire recoiled from the psychic cost of this bargain. He saw how constant exposure to news dulled sensitivity, producing what critics of the time described as nervous exhaustion.
What troubles Stiegler about today’s digital feeds is not speed alone but the way accelerated circulation captures attention before reflection can occur. The feed refreshes endlessly, pulling the reader forward while leaving little space to pause, assess or remember. Strikingly, this condition, believed to be unprecedented, was already how the 19th-century newspaper was being perceived by the likes of Baudelaire. His anxiety about newspapers was shared by others like Honoré de Balzac, the Goncourt brothers and Guy de Maupassant. They accused newspapers of exhausting the nerves, shortening attention spans, and making sustained thought difficult. Critics spoke of overexcitement and mental fatigue, symptoms that now appear in discussions on screen addiction and information overload. The parallels do not stop there. Baudelaire’s writings capture such conflicts as the newspaper making suffering visible but also normalising it through repetition. Horror became routine. Outrage was refreshed daily. Sensitivity dulled not because people stopped caring, but because they were asked to care too often, about too many things too quickly. Stiegler’s warning about digital media echoes this insight. When memory is crowded with an excess of information — digital media does this at a pace the humble newspaper can never hope to match — individuals are relieved of the burden of not just remembering but also of the need to care.
One possible way out lies in something Jacques Derrida insisted on, often against the grain of urgency that governs news: the need to slow meaning down. Derrida rejected the idea that understanding should arrive instantly, fully formed, and beyond revision. Meaning, he argued, emerges through delay, re-reading, and context. It requires time. This is where newspapers differ from digital media. Newspapers possess a built-in slowness — something that is seen as a limitation in the fast-paced world of the modern media. Yet, this limitation creates Derrida’s very pauses in which meaning can form. Even the most alarming headline has to wait until the next edition to be revised, updated or contradicted. This delay matters. It gives readers and editors time to absorb, reconsider and, most importantly, think. Derrida’s call to slow meaning down is a reminder that understanding requires temporal space. Without some resistance to speed, the present becomes a perpetual interruption, and thought never quite catches up with what it is asked to comprehend.