The habit of processing yesterday’s happenings via newsprint, television or computer screen consumes a great deal of energy in our culture. The volume combined with the tightening news cycle, creates a peculiar anxiety filled obligation.
How many homes these days have fox or cnn (depending on the preferred skew) playing round the clock. And this gets amplified by the many public forums where similar channels provide features like market watch, or weather and traffic every ten minutes, or 20/20 sports.
It’s unfortunate. In the need sustain numbers, the media has learned to play on the fears and uncertainties that will keep viewer attention. But a citizenry of news junkies does not a healthy democracy make.
A rigorous look at things makes it clear that there really is little “news.” Five or six stories a year, maybe? Five or six a decade, probably. Instead what gets trumpeted are familiar patterns of human behavior cycling around like a merry go round. High pressure system, followed by a low pressure system, followed by…
So what’s a media consumer to do? My sense is there are two options. Ignore the chatter completely or become a practitioner by creating one’s own syndication using a tool like google reader. This allows the consumer to become a filter by putting back into the system the content they have deemed newsworthy. Louis Gray’s shared items for instance keeps me abreast of what’s unfolding in the new tech sphere. Because I’ve come to trust his practice of sharing what’s important, the entire gambit that he keeps his eye on is now my filter for that field. It’s a field that interests me, but is in no way my primary interest.
So finding human filters whose practice I trust is how I’m crafting my news (cough, cough) feed.
Walking West
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The Wings of Our Moment
The Fix Is In