"News" has always been bad. Before the age of radio and television it was passed by mouth, and generally didn't travel very far, or very fast. By the time it was received, people understood that it wasn't current, and that elements may be inaccurate due to transmission and translation. The most important factor is that this news needed to travel from ear to mouth or be printed on paper. Trivial crap was filtered out. It wasn't important enough to mention.
Even in the age of radio and television, news was compiled through the day and presented at one or two times during the day. Something had to be pretty damned important to be transmitted as "breaking news".
But in the age of the Internet, much more becomes the front page of the moment, everyone is looking to the Internet for that "breaking news" story. Every story news sites publish gets its 15 minutes in the limelight as the "main" story for that section of the page. Stories are released with gramatical and spelling errors, showing little to no editorial effort; They're released out to the world as fast as authors can hit the submit button. Each news site is actively mining content off other sites so embarassing rumors and goof-ups occur constantly and spread like wildfire throughout the world. (I.e.this)
A key example of how this can, and will eventually destroy the world was a stupid story about a preacher in Florida. This self-righteous bigot had an issue with a proposed Mosque near the site of the fallen trade centre in NYC. His choice of protest? To burn copies of the Qu'ran. (Koran) To which effect he set out to advertise a Qu'ran burning day. Now in the days before the Internet, the proclamation of a minister in a back-water Florida town might have reached a number of people in New York, Florida, and might have been worthy of a mention in other city's news programs. But in the Internet age there are riots in Iran, counter-threats in various other countries and muslim community, protests, counter-protests... All because of one bigot in Florida. A similar case came up recently in China where a Chinese fishing vessel crew was detained by Japan over their presence in some contested Japanese waters. The reaction in Chinese cities was to smash anything made in Japan. This is complete lunacy. It was an excuse to smash Japanese cars owned by Chinese citizens.
People aren't meant to process so much information in such a short time, as their first natural reaction to stimuli is emotion, followed later by logic and reason. The Internet makes far too much crap in the guise of "information" available to feed the addiction of being "informed". The result is that everyone can find, or is actively encouraged to find volumes of unprocessed crap on various websites. We get to form opinions on events or topics that don't directly or even remotely affect us, or worse, choose to act on it. It's time to turn CNN.com off.
No comments:
Post a Comment