Scroll down your Twitter feed, scan newspaper front pages and you will see endless headlines relating to Syria. Not without reason given the magnitude of the conflict. Being of Syrian origin and with family living there, there is a personal connection to the war that is raging on your computer screens.

I have been actively avoiding most news relating to Syria, not for any complex political or ideological reasons, but simply to protect myself from getting seriously depressed. All the time. If I see a headline with the word “Syria” in it, I just keep on scrolling. I guess you could look at this as an amateurish experiment in psychological health. I thankfully don’t feel depressed even though I have every reason to.

This voluntary ignorance might come as a shock to a lot of people. Surely it’s neither sensible nor educated to actually avoid news? Also, nobody likes to feel completely oblivious to what’s going on in the world. Or in Britain. Or just in Cambridge.

When something big happens, say the Bin Laden assassination, a Vesuvian eruption of statuses and tweets light up the social media world. This is truly one of the greatest phenomena of our century: the ability to be informed 24/7 and publicise your opinion on these matters just as frequently.

What is it that we’re really reading, though? The news that we’re consuming is micro-news, titbits of information giving us the minimum dosage of the full story, and if the story is not sensational, there are photos on Facebook that will be more entertaining. So the stories have to shout at us loudly and seize our attention at the expense of intelligent and thought-provoking analysis. This seems to be creating an ever widening gulf between the consumers of news and the subjects of said news. It is distorting and simplifying our view of the world and the people in it, whilst simultaneously convincing us that we are more informed than ever.

Does finding out that a car bomb has gone off in Baghdad again, killing 10 people this time, make us any more informed about the city, its inhabitants and the situation as a whole? No. It dehumanises those for whom the story is most significant; they become mere statistics. We end up thinking that Baghdad must be a hell on earth beyond anything we could ever imagine. And so we don’t even try imagining. We just file Baghdad under “Awful places to live” and feel very, very sorry for everyone who calls the city home, without actually finding out any more about them.

The way that we are being fed updates you’d think that the Middle East is the only place in the world where anything bad ever happens. The image of the region that is projected by the media makes it seem like vast swathes of the region are engulfed by never ending violence, a sort of Armageddon if you will.

I am not saying that I would choose to up sticks and move to Cairo tomorrow, because it is not quite as safe as my quiet little room in Howard Lodge, but ask anyone who’s been there recently and they’ll tell you that it’s not Armageddon. Really. I don’t think that we should just go ahead and ignore everything; I’m only saying what I’m saying because news about Syria is everywhere and I really do need to know is how my family are, and the news can’t tell me that. Even if I were to read about the details of every attack from whichever side, frankly there’s nothing I can do to affect it and that feeling is not good for anyone.

The Guardian website recently published an extract from Rolf Dobelli’s essay ‘Avoid News: towards a healthy news diet’ which highlights in great detail the potential health risks of constant exposure to news bites, such as the release of excess cortisol which deregulates the immune system. Not forgetting stress.

We all need to accept that we can’t know everything that’s happening all the time everywhere, and we don’t really need to. Switching to picking and choosing the things that are most important to us, and then reading in depth about them, seems a better way to go about it to me. Be discerning, because maybe knowing a little about a topic is worse than knowing nothing at all, as it can distort your perspective on an issue and distance you from the reality on the ground.

To combat this, one can’t extol enough the virtues of investigative journalism, in-depth documentary and cultural exposure. Short of actually living in a country, these are three of the most successful ways of gaining real insight into the lives of others. I’m not saying that news channels don’t do this, because they do and they always have done, some to a mind-boggling level of insight.

It’s the endless sound bites fed to us through the non-stop news feeds that are the principal culprit, because they tend to remove a layer of analysis and add a veneer of sensationalism. There is so much top quality journalism on the internet and the blogosphere is so rich with personal accounts that we just need to look a little harder, and think a little deeper about the issues that move us. Then we become more closely connected to the people behind the stories.