My Mother-in-Law often observes the world is a terrible place and getting worse all the time. I don't agree with her. People are people wherever they are, whenever they lived. The difference the constant bombardment of information. Since the invention of the telegraph allowed news to travel great distances almost instantaneously, information has gone from a sprinkle, to a shower, to the deluge we "enjoy" today. One hundred years ago, life was bad enough right where you were. You didn't want to share everyone else's troubles. Your own were sufficient.
Are we better off flailing around in an indiscriminate information ocean? (I don't exclude this blog.)
I refused to look at news on TV or listen to talk radio the last four days. The closest I came to breaking over was walking thru the livingroom when my Dad switched over to Fox News. It took a lot of willpower, but I just walked by into the kitchen without stopping. (the desserts on the counter didn't have a thing to do with it. It was willpower, I tell you!!)
What did I miss in those four days? Celebrity trials, celebrity plane crashes, celebrity births, knifings in the midwest, abandoned baby in Arizona, missing children, murder # xxx in New York, Dems trying to figure out the election, pundits telling everyone the painfully obvious or ridiculously obscure, Republicans grandstanding... I could certainly go on and on. And by the way, if you think I cheated and looked back at the news, you're wrong. All these just swam from the murky water between my ears right onto the blog. I didn't even listen to Bill Bennett this morning or Hugh Hewitt this evening. Hey, that makes it five days. Well, I'll admit I did look at RealClearPolitics.com this afternoon.
Will Rogers was often quoted saying, "All I know is what I read in the papers." Would we be better off it that was all the information we had? I don't think so, particularly if all one read was our local liberal rag. But, it would be more manageable, easier to assimilate and actually has some potential value to us locally. Maybe that is what attracts many people to blogs. Bite-sized bits of information about things they really care about in one spot, with links if they want them.
Maybe the day will come when we can really customize the news we want to see, and can filter out all the junk that shouldn't have been reported more than 50 miles from where it occured. I'm not saying that less news will make us happy. I'm just saying it might make us less sad.
GBW
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment