Are things getting worse? Should we worry about life as we know it? If you listen to the media for long enough, you’d think that the only sane course of action would be to draw the blinds, lock the doors and disconnect the phone. Oh, and disable your wireless connection. The news is relentlessly dire, full of endless wars and disasters (natural and man-made), the immoral behaviour of those who ought to draw our admiration (business leaders, government ministers, sportsmen and celebrities alike), not our continual condemnation, and a stream of events predicted to be about to gallop over the horizon towards us, designed to wipe us off the face of the planet: global warming, flu pandemics, fuel shortages, aliens, solar flares, etc., etc. Should we give in to these worries, and sink into a deep, collective depression?
Our senses are assaulted at an ever increasing rate for two reasons: the staggering growth rate of the human race which, by inference, means that war, pestilence and disaster will continue to affect larger and larger proportions of the population; and, the relentless advances in microprocessing technology and the means by which we access data, which enable ever increasing volumes of data to be fired around the world in smaller and smaller fractions of seconds, instantly viewed on state-of-the-art portable handsets while you sit on a bus in Hackney or a rickshaw in Hong Kong. So, events which, decades ago, would have found there way into newspapers several weeks after they occurred, and merited only a paragraph or two by some unheard of correspondent, are now flashed onto television screens and tablets, in minutes, by very familiar faces. Breaking News is the current competitive metric by which the media channels hope to get there first, delivering the latest horrific piece of news through earnest, honest-looking experts all telling us why we really ought to listen up this time, and worry like hell.
What if we just turned off the television, disconnected the computer and never read another newspaper again? Would we be any worse off? On balance, probably yes. The ready availability of information should help people make more informed decisions. The internet has been a revelation, and will continue to amaze for years to come as it turns our children into app-fed addicits. But, perhaps, just maybe, the tap has been turned on much too hard. Someone somewhere ought to react to the onslaught, and turn it down a bit before the bath overflows and we all drown in an unregulated yottabyte of newsflow.
What a terrific story that would make, if there was anyone left to write it!
Copyright © David Thomas Cochrane 2011