“…Anyway, the press is unbearably stupid and conformist, don’t you find?” he insisted.
“I don’t know, really, I don’t read it.”
“You’ve never opened a newspaper?”
“Yes, probably,” Jed said good-naturedly, but in fact he had no memory of ever doing so. He managed to visualize piles of Le Figaro Magazine on a coffee table, in his dentist’s waiting room; but his dental problems had been solved a long time ago. In any case, he never _felt the need_ to buy a newspaper. In Paris the atmosphere is saturated with information. Whether you like it or not, you see the headlines in the kiosks, you hear conversations in the supermarket lines. When he went up to Creuse for his grandmother’s funeral, he’d realized that the atmosphere density of information diminished considerably the farther you got away from the capital; and that, more generally, human affairs lost their importance and gradually everything disappeared, except plants.

From Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory, pp. 89-90