Reading 5       Many of us can still remember when the news used to be a pleasant distraction fromeveryday life, the desk-bound office procrastinator's preferred form of escapism. Itis remarkable how rapidly things have changed.More and more, the news is not asource of escapism, but the thing one yearns to escape. This feeling represents a newand acute phase of a long-term historical shift: we used to live in a world in whichinformation was scarce, but now information is essentially limitless, and what isscarce is the supply of attention.       As advances in technology made it easier to distribute news - and more newsproviders began to compete for readers - a subtle inversion began: the reader'sattention, not information, became the truly valuable commodity. In an attentionalarms race, every news provider - and ultimately, every news story - competes againstall others to worm its way into consumers' minds. Beginning in the 19th century.entrepreneurs such as Benjamin Day, the founding publisher of the New York Sun, hitupon a revolutionary business model: sell a paper for less than it cost to produce, packit with |urid stories, then make your money selling space to advertisers, who wereeffectively buying access to readers' attention. This naturally encouraged exaggerationand fabrication. And as news comes to dominate public consciousness, extreme. luridand even false stories come to dominate the news. After all, the commercialimperatives don't even necessarily require a story to be true, so long as it ismaximally compelling: fake news is not an aberration from, but rather the logicalconclusion to, a media economy "optimised for engagement."        It's worth stepping back to notice how strange it is, considering the underlyingpurpose of news, to spend this much of our time thinking about it. If our interest innews has evolutionary origins, that's because there are obvious survival advantages instaying aware of local and immediate threats to one's own life and tribe. One majorachievement of civilisation is that we've expanded our capacity for caring to includenews that doesn't affect us personally, but where we might be able to make adifference, whether by voting or volunteering or donating. But the modern attentioneconomy exploits both these urges, not to help us stay abreast of threats, or improvethe lives of others, but to generate profits for the attention merchants. So it pumnmelsus ceaselessly with incidents, regardless of whether it truly matters, and with humansuffering, regardless of whether it's in our power to relieve it. The belief that we'remorally obliged to stay plugged in - that this level of time commitment and emotionalinvestment is the only way to stay informed about the state of the world - begins tolook more and more like an alibi for our addiction to our devices.
【題組】45. According to the author, which of the following is true:
(A) The ability to access limitless information is a blessing in disguise.
(B) News today serves the role as a haven from our daily troubles.
(C)We let news take over reality in the name of staying informed.
(D) The appearance of fake news is an unexpected result of the rise ofcommercialized mass media.
(E) Our addiction to digital devices can be traced to the evolutionary origin of ourinterest in news.