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I grew up as television was growing up. I was born in 1956 and lived through the “Golden Age” of network television.
Television was part of my childhood and teenage years, but I had no reference point before television. Captain Kangaroo had always been there on the black and white television in the corner of our modest house.
My parents also lived through the “Golden Age” of television, but they had many years of life without television. They had grown up in rural America in the first quarter of the 20th century. Nether had education beyond high school. They grew up around the birth of radio, but television was something new to them.
I remember the many experiences we shared together around the television. The Cuban Missile Crisis. The Kennedy and King assassinations. The Space program. Sporting events. Vietnam.
Every evening, the news with Walter Conkrite was the touchstone for my family’s view of the world. Yes, we had a local newspaper, but the immediacy and authority of television worked its way into our lives as it did the lives of so many Americans.
I never thought much about what television meant in our family until years later.
My dad had many anxieties, and one of his worst was the weather. He was extremely afraid of storms and he was devoted to the local television weather reports, the weather warnings on local radio and the information from his weather radio.
All of this before the Weather Channel and the endless hype about weather on every television channel.
When storms were coming, my dad was terrified, and the weather media helped him stay agitated and frightened for hours.
If my dad had lived to see the Doppler Warnings on today’s weather reports and the endless focus on weather disasters on 24 weather channels, I’m pretty sure it would have caused strokes, heart attack or a complete nervous breakdown.
But that’s how the world has changed. My dad didn’t know all kinds of things that I know, whether I want to- or need to- know them or not. And that seems to be a good thing.
I now have media telling me about every disaster, every danger, every warning, every piece of research, every scary statistic and every threat to world peace imaginable. If I don’t imbibe the media kool-aid myself, I’ll meet ten people every day at work who have information bombs to explode.
(Christians are so susceptible to media gullibility that it’s frightening. When I sit down to lunch in the cafeteria and hear the sentence, “I’ve been researching his on the internet,” I know I’m very likely about to hear 1) complete distortions and untruths 2) swallowed whole, digested and now spit back up with authority that would make any scientist blush.)
Last week, one of the major internet news outlets did a front page piece on 5 ways the world might end. Have a nice day America. Here’s your water cooler topic. For a whole day, we learned how a solar storm would take us back to the Neanderthal age. (If you believe in that sort of thing.)
I’m glad my dad didn’t have to deal with that amount of information. Or the story just below it: Oprah Gushes Over Winslet’s Breasts. Or the next day’s proclamation that the national debt won’t be paid off unless Jesus gives us the money.
My dad didn’t have Bill O’Reilley or Keith Obermann ranting five nights a week about all the terrible things the ordinary person can’t get by without knowing and getting furious over. C’mon, ordinary Americans. Are you pissd off yet? Well WHY NOT!!) Of course, the irony is that most people get by without knowing those things quite easily, but if you watch the media flamethrowers, western civilization and the existence of God are all up for grabs every night .
The farmers, illegal immigrants, working Joes and people in the nursing homes seem to get by just fine without knowing there is a desperate crisis every ten minutes.
The whole world is now drowning in undifferentiated information; everything is a panic and a crisis. Everything must be heard, everyone must pay attention. All the bad news that has happened and could happen must be paraded out for panic drills. All the unsolvable and uncontrollable situations must be heard about so we can demand the governments solve the problem.
Contemporary life must be lived with maximum information and maximum hype. It’s a crisis!! All the time!!! But first….ANOTHER CRISIS!!! AFTER THE COMMERCIALS!!!!!!
My mom and dad lived through the onset of the television era when we still had some sanity regarding the amount of information a person needed to live. The Cuban missile crisis really was more important than……I’m actually afraid to write anything ridiculous here because some of you will go nuts no matter what I mention.
The world is the world as its always been. But now we know about our carbon footprint. Now we know there’s a war on Christmas. Now we know what President Obama’s pastor once said in a sermon somewhere. Now we know what Sean Hannity and Chris Matthews consider to be worth writing a book about. Now we know how many pets were displaced by Hurricane Katrina and how big Paris Hilton’s lips are after the injections.
This isn’t a better world than the world of my parents. Oh sure, there’s better health information in there somewhere amidst all the hype, spin, ads and unadulterated crap. I guess we can all be grateful that we’re able to see the problems in the world we can each solve with a small monthly check, just before we learn if Tom Cruise really has Katie locked up in a tool shed on a Scientology ranch.
The information age is the ultimate double-edged sword. It’s brought to you by the same technology and information pipeline that brings you this blog. (A blog where, by the way, posts on egg nog are right next to the ones on starving children in the Sudan.)
My parents grew up in a world where a crisis was the ’37 flood taking away the farm or a world war taking away your brothers. They grew up in a world where television entertained and only occasionally sought to tell you what was important.
For my parents, what was important happened in your family, your neighborhood or maybe your county. Events in Washington or around there world were distant, and when they touched you, it was for reasons of obvious importance.
Were they ignorant? Were they under informed? Would their lives have been better if they could set in front of Fox News or CNN and watch the stock market’s every move?
I don’t think so.
They trusted a few sources of information. They believed that what they heard in church and Sunday School was what was really important. (And that came from their own pastor! Not a religious channel!!)
They believed in talking to their neighbors and family about what was going on in the community. Perhaps they needed to be overwhelmed by information, so they would know they couldn’t be happy without the stock market at 14,000 or a flat screen television. Perhaps they needed to be wired into the world-wide information superhighway, where “friends” are tiny pictures on facebook that may never say a word to you and “neighborhood” is the a collection of property belonging to other strangers you never talk to.
No…I think their world was better. And I say that with full knowledge that I never saw my parents read a book or listen to music that wasn’t on the radio. They were deprived of a lot, but their world wasn’t utter and complete chaos.
They didn’t believe the nonsense we believe. They weren’t enslaved to the consumer religion. They didn’t judge their children in comparison to anyone other than Wally and the Beaver. They didn’t judge their lives in comparison to the houses on the Better Homes Channel. They didn’t judge a meal by Rachel Ray or a church by Joel Osteen.
Media occupied its place in their world. They didn’t serve as pawns in the world of media.
And that’s what many of us have become. Pawns in a game where we hardly exist except as an audience for the information, consumer and entertainment establishment.
Shall we talk about pornography? The entertainment addicted personality? The damage to American health by the couch potato lifestyle? The philosophical relativism that lies at the heart of this construction of reality? The loss of our souls? The loss of simplicity and blissful ignorance?
For another day. For now, I’m just remembering the lives of my parents, and wondering if anyone has lived through the same sad revolution in the quality of our lives?
Would you consider anyone who lives submerged into today’s media culture to have much of a dependable idea of what it means to be a normal human being?
Yeah, me neither.
The Internet Monk Archives 
“Personally, I’m just waiting for the day when the electric grid collapses and we all get a little forced perspective on what life is really about.”
Move to the southeast coast. 3 times since 96 much of the area has lost power for nearly a week due to hurricanes and ice storms. And for a few days several times. Lots of neighbors got to “catch up”. I’m somewhat for turning off the grid once a year. In nice weather of course. 🙂
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In or around 1854, Soren Kierkegaard described what he called the “unnatural world-historical consciousness” of the modern (wo)man. By this he meant the awareness of global events that makes one feel totally insignificant, like a gnat being swept along in a hurricane. He said that by having this unnatural consciousness of world-historical events, one is blinded to the ethical. Because people were being inundated with information about events they could do nothing about, and that they were assured were of the utmost importance, they began to feel like their individual lives had no import, and so they would neglect to do that which was in front of them to do.
We’ve got it 10 times worse nowadays, but it’s been going on for a long time…way before OJ. Turn off the TV, only read the local section of the paper and change the topic when the co-workers start in on the next big disaster news story, if that’s possible. Personally, I’m just waiting for the day when the electric grid collapses and we all get a little forced perspective on what life is really about.
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If anyone is still reading this posting…
“When I was a boy in the 50’s and 60’s our evenings were spent …”
Growing up in Ky during the 60s winter & spring was:
Tuesdays & Fridays were for high school basketball
Saturdays & Mondays were for college basketball (with tape delays of all UK games by the later 60s)
Sunday was for church and visiting
Wednesday was for prayer meetings
Thursday was our off day.
During the fall we got Mondays and Tuesdays off with Friday and Saturday for football.
Summers were when kids played baseball, rode bikes, scraped knees, etc..
Now it’s just a bit different.
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Weren’t they promising personal jetpacks and flying cars Back In The Day? Where’s my jetpack!?
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I don’t really know unless it is with small support groups from your church or elsewhere but even these are not really deep because you are put together by one common interest not an entire life.
As I said, I’m guilty.
I’ve lived in my current home for almost 6 years and only really know one neighbor.
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Rob,
I tend to agree with you about the loss of community. I admit that my closest friends are those who live at a distance; two of whom I’ve moved away from, the third I’ve never met. (only the Internet.)
So now, the question becomes: How do we become communities again.
Or for me (having lived in 7 different areas in 18 years) find those who will help me find my place in their established community.
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When the Loma Prieta earthquake hit back in ‘89, we tried to call our friends–and failed; the phones were dead. So on went the TV, and we heard the endless loop of the same statements over and over, with minor updates. The Goodyear blimp was available to show us what was going on, but for what seemed like hours all it showed was the same burning house. — James
Or when that airliner piled into the Pacific off the SoCal coast one January night. I remember hours (not what seemed like hours, actual HOURS) of helicopter coverage showing only the waves of the Pacific. That was it.
Some afternoon drive-time wags talked about “What would have happened if there’d been a freeway car chase in the middle of that? Would the TV News Anchor switch to that? Or stay on the ocean waves? Or go crazy with indecision — “WHAT DO I SHOW? WHAT DO I DO?”
And if you’re not too Church Lady to take PG-rated mashup videos, here’s one that says it all — JibJab’s “What We Call The News”.
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Perhaps I’m straying too far off topic but I would agree that the most egregious outcome of the information and entertainment glut is the loss of community.
When I was a boy in the 50’s and 60’s our evenings were spent mostly visiting with neighbors and relatives.
Almost every Summer evening was spent with adults on my grandparents front porch and the kids playing in the yard, barns and pastures.
These adults were all a part of my raising. Not just my parents and grandparents but uncles, aunts family friends and others.
The topics of discussion were sometimes world or national events but mostly the topics were local.
Weather, crop and livestock prices, local politics, church.
For entertainment someone might sing or tell a joke or an oft told favorite family story.
Is the world better now?
No. We live in insulated isolated prisons of our own making while we quake in fear of the current disaster and then sooth ourselves with mindless “entertainment”.
And before anyone thinks I’m preaching I am guilty as charged.
When we lost our sense of community and family we lost something extremely valuable in being human.
Can we go back? No, I think the genie is out of the bottle.
But we can find ways to connect. This is not easy as we have become effectively a nation of agoraphobics.
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“The best (worst?) is the TV preacher who has convinced her that most medical problems are due to intestinal parasites and “he†has the Christian cure.”
Tell her not to worry; the Communists/New World Order/Jesuit spies have been putting the deadly poison fluoride in our drinking water to make us stupid/docile/infertile/dead. With any luck it will kill the parasites first:-)
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This would be too funny if it weren’t so true. I work at a mainline seminary, and I’ve never met so many well-educated, intelligent people who listen to so much right-leaning talk radio and so easily buy into any conspiracy touted there (or on right-leaning tv). They have no understanding that if these programs didn’t shock and excite, the audience would shrink. It’s also one of the more depressing things I’ve witnessed in my life. These are the people who will be teaching and preaching to future generations, and they so easily “drink the kool-aid”. The main stream media may not be perfect, but neither are the conservative pundits who are all over the airwaves; but where I work, you’d never know that.
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Great post, Michael. I’ve been thinking the same thing for some time now. At the end of our lives, I don’t think that we’re going to give a rip that we kept up with Paris Hilton or Lindsey Lohan or the news/opinion/gossip that we injest. I don’t think that we’ll wish that we had watched more television or spent more time surfing the net.
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Nice post Michael. Though I find it funny and ironic that you post this just after I have spent 1 entire week at a youth convention (so I’m probably at least half your age and well and truly within the “net-generation”) here in Australia where we didn’t have television. Or newspapers. Or even access to the net (well apart from one person in my dorm room who brought along his netbook and a prepaid wireless net connection that I used for a bit to check my emails for a church activity that I was involved with organizing).
In that one week away from the world, I only heard about one major issue (that is the situation in Gaza) and daily, a simple weather report from the convention organizers. Nothing more. And in that one week away from the media (Christian or otherwise), I was probably the least stressed than I have ever been. I was happier than I have been in that one week meeting & developing new friendships & acquaintances rather than watching stock market reports, mindless and soulless entertainment and pointless news reports on issues that are of trivial importance but which are sensationalized up to become “breaking news”.
It’s reminding me a lot of what my own grandmother keeps telling me whenever I go overseas to visit her. That TV and the media are pathetic substitutes for human-to-human interaction and that I need to use my noggin’ to really process and think about the information that I do “consume” each day instead of blabbering whatever it is that the media tell me is important.
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>….everyone is home watching the latest new episode on the SciFi channel on Friday nights or playing XBox or surfing the net while texting their friends.
Don’t even get me started. So true, even in Ky, though we have a lot of small town support for sports. And for church.
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Getting back to the tittle of this blog:
Is This the “Better World†You Were Talking About?
One thing that has definitely gotten worse is the concept of local community. Before cable TV, iPods and such, local high school basketball and football games were broadcast on local AM radio in many (most?) parts of the country. And people went to the games. Even folks with no kids on the teams. I remember going to basketball invitational tournaments in rural KY where it was wall to wall people. Standing room only. All to enjoy the game. Adults and kids. Now it’s hard to fill up a gym for a top ten team in a state, much less a typical game. Ditto football. Everyone is home watching the latest new episode on the SciFi channel on Friday nights or playing XBox or surfing the net while texting their friends.
And yes I understand KY is a bit outside of the bell curve with basketball but still many schools across the country have lost that community involvement in school athletics over the last 40 years. I’ve lived in KY, PA, CT, and NC since my youth and this trend has been happening in all of those places.
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“Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.”
G. K. Chesterton
When the Loma Prieta earthquake hit back in ’89, we tried to call our friends–and failed; the phones were dead. So on went the TV, and we heard the endless loop of the same statements over and over, with minor updates. The Goodyear blimp was available to show us what was going on, but for what seemed like hours all it showed was the same burning house.
I grant you that this sort of thing makes for an exciting story–something people can take an interest in; but what I really wanted was for the camera to pan the city, and focus in on random places to give the rest of the world an idea of how severe and widespread the damage was. What was the probability that our friends were still alive?
How about a map with pins on it showing where people had reported damage, or fire, or no damage?
That didn’t have the human interest of interviewing some official, I guess.
Hours of TV and no information: I was angry.
We found out the next day that our friends were fine, and so was their house.
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Four years ago we took the rather misunderstood step of stopping watching Tv. I mean totally. Know what? My husband and I don’t miss it and our ten year old twins are fine without it too. We took up new musical instruments and I had more time for writing and my art.
For news we go to a couple of pretty credible websites. For weather, internet as well. So ya, I agree with willoh, dump the tube!
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I have to quit reading your comments like they are your doctoral thesis statements. Sorry about that. I will promise to switch to de-caf.
Remember that movie where the newscaster said, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!”
and TV’s rained out of windows onto the street? ah,, wonderful thought. Dump the tube.
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Clark,
90% is an exaggeration. Apparently I’ve reached a point here at IM that I need to hire a professional statistician. Remind me not to make any statements with numbers anymore with lawyers nearby.
I’m thrilled beyond words that you- and I- completely ignore James Dobson. But there’s a reason every conservative politician kisses his….ring. There’s a reason he gets tens of millions of dollars and is known as the “Big Gorilla.” There’s a reason he dictates to most evangelical organizations who their audience can be.
The reason is that when Dobson says jump- i.e. write your congressman, etc.- millions of people say “How high.”
Forget the 90%. Forget the people like you and me that could care less if Dobson leaves his wife and marries a chihuahua. In evangelicalism, his does the thinking and the general bullying for millions and millions of people. Hundreds of thousands of pastors take their culture war orders from him. The FRC is the biggest bully in the conservative evangelical schoolyard.
So sure, I can ignore him, and plan to continue to do so. All that has nothing to do with the millions of people he does influence.
Your logic seems to be: If the influence doesn’t influence me, then there’s nothing to be alarmed about. Everyone can do what I do.
Exactly how does that work? I get to say that I don’t buy Sean Hannity’s version of political dialogue or Bill O’Reilly’s bull, so if someone rings out a warning, the answer is “You can turn him off like I do?”
Fine. Let’s deal with what’s going on in evangelicalism that way and see how it works. I’m pretty it will end up with the whole county flooded and me and my cow on the roof of the barn. “Where’s the rest of those dummies? Couldn’t they swim?”
My way is this: Ring the bell and warn the town that there’s a flood coming. Warn evangelicals every time I can. Call it like I see it on the day to day, even if there are other things I could look at. When I’m done, I may be an alarmist. Or I may have been a ringing bell. Small difference to me, but maybe a big difference to someone listening.
peace
ms
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“You are surely aware that on any given day James Dobson can say jump and 90% of the Christians you work with come in with knots on their heads from hitting the ceiling.”
I think 90% is an exageration, but let’s say it’s true. Is that Dobson’s fault, or the fault of those easily led? By your own admission, you blog endlessly. Is that the fault of the internet and its creators, or have you perhaps done a poor job managing your time? I happen to like your blog, and don’t think that time is wasted.
If Dobson said “jump” regardless of what other Christians do I wouldn’t even know about it. Today I had the chance to spend about 4 hours online, but the rest of this week I’ve been driving a bus, teaching at BCM, and watching high school basketball games. The media wants us to think everything is a crisis. It’s up to the individual to filter, and there are many people that manage to. Just because there’s pie in the fridge doesn’t mean we have to eat it.
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I’m thinking of pitching a remake of Father Knows Best, only instead of a salesman the Dad is professional clown —
I will call it Father’s Best Nose ;@)
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“It all started with the OJ Simpson trial and how popular that trial was …”
This is so incredibly true. My wife has worked at a call center for a major airline for 20+ years. The phone calls have only stopped twice. One was for the verdict in the OJ trial. Absolutely no calls. The other I forget but it wasn’t quite as noticeable. But for OJ, silence.
“A family member has been trying to convert my mom, but since the conversation also includes government microchips in vaccines, aliens really being demons, and the need to invest in gold, Jesus comes off as just one more strange item on the list.”
Are you sure we’re not related? This family member sounds like my mom on one of her better days. On other days there’s a lot more baggage. Mostly from, as my brother calls them, the “blue haired preachers.” The best (worst?) is the TV preacher who has convinced her that most medical problems are due to intestinal parasites and “he” has the Christian cure. And none of her college educated sons earning a living in technical knowledge based fields know enough to know the “truth” of the matter. 😦
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Onward,Forward,Toward: Now that you mention it…does seem as though the news media is practicing what we teachers are encouraged to to…..teach to the lowest levels. When you think about it….those of us who are informed don’t need an analyst telling us what we heard. But there are lots of folks out there in media land who sometimes find it hard to understand the why and how of things. My husband gets so frustrated at the sports commentators for ‘explaining’ every play. I keep reminding him of those watching who need the verbal play by play in order to enjoy the game.
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That is not a generalization. That is a statement of fact.
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One of the problems about the media is that pundits and spinsters grossly outnumber the axctual journalists. Its easier and more profitable to package, market, and distribute the news for ratings sake than to do honest journalism.
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Bob Brague:
All generalizations are false?
All people are sinners. False generalization?
peace
ms
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Well, as they say, everything has two sides. I’m of the television age of Rin Tin Tin, Roy Rogers, Hit Parade, Father Knows Best, and other ‘pure’ programming. Told my age …didn’t I? Television is like medication….can be used for good or abused. I’m a lover of Nat GEO channel and recently saw special programming on the Hubble Telescope which my brother-in-law helped construct, the Mars rovers ….Opportunity and Spirit, and on origin of the Cosmos. I gotta tall ya……..they beat the heck out of Roy Rogers, Rin Tin Tin, and Hit Parade. I watched all those and literally thanked God for technology that would allow me to see His magnificent universe.
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iMonk:
Your points are well made.
Along with this ‘oversaturation’ of the media, I am beginning to wonder if the media is on the thin line of breaking one of the cardinal rules of journalism
Reporting the story and not being the story.
It seems with the ‘oversaturation’ and also the ‘breaking news’ and ‘anonymous tips from our sources’ that news is appearing to one day get to a point where someone is going to commit a crime but first tell a ‘pre-selected’ news media outlet beforehand to where they can get their cameras there and record the crime calling it ‘exclusive coverage’ in the name of ratings.
It is really a sad day when news is being broadcasted and we no longer report the basic facts of the news. We now have ‘on staff analysts’ (a retired army General who tells us how Iraq should have been conquered, a retired wall street broker who tells us how we could have avoided bailout, a retired FBI agent who tells us how we could have prevented this terrorism, a retired police detective who tells us how he would have found more leads and have already solved the crime, a former presidential cabinet member who is buying time for his bestselling book contract, a former district / prosecuting attorney who would have told us how they would have prosecuted this case, a former public defender who would have told us how to get the alleged criminal free, a former CIA agent who would have set us straight on foreign policy, a former judge who would have told us if he would have sustained or overruled an objection, etc) who analyzes everything about a particular piece of news and analytical speculation is discussed more than the facts and the analytical speculation is peddled off as news.
The most ironic thing about it all is that all of this is immediately followed by a segment of
‘ANALysts’ who analyzes the other analyst’s analysis.
And the news and facts are now lost and everyone is so saturated to where it would be hard to find a jury of your peers who hasn’t been ‘tainted’ by the news coverage because we now have a nation of armchair experts, armchair analysts, armchair jurors, armchair lawyers, and a armchair expert on experts.
It all started with the OJ Simpson trial and how popular that trial was (it pre-empted a NBA finals game) to where we had to have constant news coverage and court tv and it exploded from there. It was further escalated when Richard Jewell was named a suspect and found to not done the crime and we created the term ‘person of interest’ because suspect predetermined ‘guilt’. Remember the 2000 election where we quit calling the winners of electorial college votes because it caused people in California to not vote thinking the election was over? Remember the DC Sniper and the numerous ex police detectives who became news media superstars? Remember Caylee Anthony? Remember Michael Jackson? Remember Hurricane Katrina?
The news phenomenon has now become the soap-opera of choice for people who want to know now what eventually happened to a particular person instead of waiting for tomorrow’s episode.
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All generalizations are false, including this one.
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I certainly didn’t say I was describing “all” Christians.
Do I really need to load up my writing with a dozen qualifiers for each sentence? OK. Read fast in a hushed voice.
“Description does not pertain to all Christians or all older persons. Exceptions occur a significant amount of the time. General statements are meant to be interpreted with common reasonable limits.”
I guess I do need all those qualifiers. I am writing to Christians after all. 🙂
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If you think the tin foil hat wearing whack jobs are all Christians, you are not getting out enough. There are lot’s of black helicopter theorists, Rove conspiricists, AIDS and Crack are government plot fearers, and Ming is the end of America’s empire nut jobs out there in non Christian circles.
I don’t find that the right wingers or the Christians have any monopoly…or even a dominant market share… on Crazy.
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I watched a program on how we are affected by the media. One thing that was shown was a study that was done on African tribes people who had never seen any video. They showed them a detective drama with dialogue and chase scenes. These people had no clue as to what was going on. What we have been trained (brainwashed) to connect into a storyline they saw as completely unrelated clips. One car was going one way, another car going another way. Then some people were talking somewhere else. A man was running away from them up a hill, then he was running toward them up the hill.
We have been so hardwired to visual media that when something real happens, like a jetliner crash-landing in the Hudson River, we say ubiquitously, “It was just like a movie.” Art used to imitate life — now life is only “real” if it imitates art. Idol worship has reached its zenith.
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>>@ IMonk: you said, “Christians believe anything or they believe nothing. Their filters are totally screwed.”
I have never met any Christians like this here in NH. I have lived in NH all my life, in the same town, on the same street. The Christians I know are not gullible. They test everything. They filter everything. My parents live up the street and I must admit, in their old age, they have become fearful of most things. It is sad to see this happening to them. My dad was career military and the fearful older man he has become is unrecognizable to me. Perhaps it is just a part of getting older. I wonder if the same will occur to me as well. My guess is, it will.
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Good post. Without the intention of looking at this issue with the motive of only being bizarre for the sake of the gospel, I wonder what being the “people of God”, “a holy nation”, strangers (“live as strangers” vs. be strange), pilgrims, aliens, outcasts, etc. would look like we as disciples brought all of this under the rule of Christ and the control of the Spirit in our life, the community of faith and as a witness to the world?
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Imonk,
I see what your saying about “filter” above.
And I would add to that by saying that whether we are spending an inordinate amount of [nonworking free] time watching the T.V. or listening to radio, it takes away from the kind of community there used to be, I think, when the neighbors came around and drank lemonade on the front porch on a hot day.
Of course, I would think, this kind of activity was more prevalent when there wasn’t any air conditioning.
And before there was modern heating, I would imagine that the family gathered around the fire place to keep warm which brought the family together.
I don’t want to idealize those times as if sin did not exist back then, but I do think it is a mistake if we modern folk pity them as if we are soooooooo well off today.
In some ways we are probably more impoverished.
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Imonk
“2) Christians. Christians believe anything or they believe nothing.”
Not a little jaded here are we? Some of us actually think. Really! I have been painted with a broad brush.
I find agnostic liberals [I do not mean democrats or political liberals] to be the easiest group of people to be deluded. They have nothing to believe in so they will believe anything. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, they have yet to begin.
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“Christians believe anything or they believe nothing. Their filters are totally screwed.”
Yup. A family member has been trying to convert my mom, but since the conversation also includes government microchips in vaccines, aliens really being demons, and the need to invest in gold, Jesus comes off as just one more strange item on the list.
Interestingly, this person also reads all kinds of semi-heretical theology websites with the rationale that he has to investigate them thoroughly in case they might be true- definitely no filter. Odd behavior for a literalist young earther who is quick to bash any kind of evolution anywhere, IMHO.
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I hate watching TV, I turn into a zombie-like creature and my mother could be dying and I wouldn’t notice. Because of this, although I have a TV, I have no cable and only a couple movies I’ve already seen (and therefore am not particularly interested in watching). I also occasionally turn it on to watch the news on a snowy channel, but I hear I won’t be able to do that much more.
My friends think I’m crazy and I’m totally out of touch with reality, but I feel more alive when not watching TV.
Give it a try. Limit your internet roaming to three sites or so, none of them involving news or gossip. I promise you that you’ll still find out everything you *need* to know. And you’ll feel lighter and more free.
I’m one of the younger generation though, so I’m constantly on the internet; blogs mostly. I think I need to apply the two hour rule here…
Last Advent I gave up blogs as a penance and it was amazing how much more at peace I was. When something horrible happened I usually found out from friends or coworkers, other than that I remained thankfully blissful to how wonderful Winslet’s breasts. I’ve decided that I enjoyed the penance too much and although I’m planning on doing it again for Lent, I’ll need something a bit more penetential in addition.
Although given this mindset, I’m not sure I’d say the older generations were better off, or that we are. Before we had narrow world views, less information, more peace of mind, more “real world” experience. Now we have a global world view (body of Christ image is clear), more information, less peace of mind and less “real world” experience.
Which is better? In both cases you’re dealing with a fallen humanity in bad need of right order (Grace). With Grace we can have a balance of all these factors, without that it’s just a change in environment for a fallen creature who’ll find any excuse to fall into an extreme.
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You do have a point about the information glut. There is a tremendous amount of bad or exaggerated information out there. And it does bombard us wherever we go.
But is the alternative any better? Were we really any better off when we only had a few limited outlets from which to get our information?
I look at the extreme bias that permeates every news (both right and left) outlet and think about how horrible it would be if I was stuck with only a few outlets to get my information from. Yes, there is a lot of junk out there, but at least I can find the whole story if I want. I wouldn’t be able to get the real story if I was limited to just a few outlets.
Maybe it was different in your parents day. Maybe the news outlets were more trustworthy and less biased. But in today’s world, the news outlets are not very trustworthy and almost always slant a story towards their own bias. So I wouldn’t want to go back to the way it was before.
More information is never a bad thing. People just need to learn how to filter that information for relevance and accuracy.
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I’ll be 68 in March and am trying to figure out where I fit in your two categories, which seem to be misnomers.
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You mean…Obama is *not* a Muslim and vaccines are *not* a conspiracy and the speed of light is *not* an illusion????
Most “Christians” (notice, not Christians) would just prefer to kill the messenger.
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Other Jean: A good word, but I have a lot of concern for two groups of people who can’t seem to get the filter in place.
1) Older people. I have older family members and friends that live in front of the political/economic talk shows 24/7. When they talk to me, they talk constantly about what this liberal said or what this doomsday economist said. It’s sad. I mean really sad. My dad sat in the yard, fed squirrels and went to drink lots of coffee in his declining years.
2) Christians. Christians believe anything or they believe nothing. Their filters are totally screwed. Any science they don’t like is totally disproven by some expert on TBN or talk radio. Anything they want to believe is proven by the same hacks. So Obama is a Muslim, Vacines are a conspiracy, the speed of light is an illusion and on and on.
peace
ms
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Well, yes. But I admit it, I’m a news junkie. I do like to keep up with what’s going on in the world, through cable, the internet, even an occasional newspaper. You have to develop internal filters, though, or it will drive you crazy. Yes, Yellowstone National Park is really a super-volcano. Yes, an asteroid hit Earth 65 million years ago, and at least helped wipe out the dinosaurs. Yes, someday Yellowstone will explode, and someday an asteroid will hit Earth again. Does it matter TO ME, NOW? Nope. It’s interesting, not relevant to my life at present.
So much of 24/7/365 news is like that: space filler. News is by definition new, and nothing is more stale than yesterday’s news. So all the media keep it coming, relentlessly, and it all seems to be equally important. It’s not.
A hundred years ago, we here in Maryland would never have known about a house fire in Chicago, or a mudslide in California, or a murder in Miami, or an earthquake in Japan, because they weren’t important to Marylanders. Now we know; and if we can’t filter it out, we’ll be swamped by a sense that the world is an increasingly dangerous place. Not really; not in most ways. It’s just that our perspective has changed. We get news about all the disasters, everywhere.
Filter it out. Turn it off. Decide what you need today, and ignore the rest. It’s the only way to survive.
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“My dad had many anxieties, and one of his worst was the weather. He was extremely afraid of storms and he was devoted to the local television weather reports, the weather warnings on local radio and the information from his weather radio.”
I wonder how much of this had to do with men who grew up on farms before TV. My father and his friends who grew up on farms but left them as adults tended to obsess about the weather. I suspect some of this came from the weather totally ruling your day to day plans on the farm. And this seemed to be a man thing. I don’t remember women being nearly as obsessed about it.
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Yeah, but Rachael Ray is the cutest thing, so what’s wrong with learning to cook from her? I want to get around to using one of her grilled cheese recipes.
Nevermind. What I want to say about the post is you make a great point, and I wrote about part of this last weekend, that gossip and celebrity news is choking our news sites and feeds. Still, we have abundant opportunity to discern the truth, as you have, and discipline ourselves to swim in the information sea instead of drown in it. We can take in news selectively and talk to others about our doubts of their internet research. I hate that the Oprah-Winslet lovefest headline was shoved at me, but I can improve my news intact and avoid seeing most of that kind of thing.
Noting willoh’s comment above, we don’t have a TV either for reasons like that, but mostly because we know we would waste time watching Rachael Ray and Alton Brown, if we thought we could afford that level of cable.
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We are so blessed to have a vacation spot in the Lakes Region of NH where we seasonally park our travel-trailer. It is a small place, only 28 sites, the majority of them are Christians. It is very quiet. It is located in a valley and therefore, no TV, no internet, no cell phone access.
I’ve also experienced news-blackouts when on short-term mission trips.
I am a news junkie and therefore, at these times, I often miss my 24 hour news channels. To date, being a news junkie has not caused any worry or anxiety for me. I think it is an individual preference and the reaction to all the information is an individual thing.
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Excellent post, iMonk.
I was born in the sixties and raised without TV. My parents refused to get one because they believe that TV makes you stupid. I read a lot.
To this day, I only watch the news when I’m forced to. Like when I’m trapped in the doctor’s office without a remote.
But last year I got really wound up reading the internet “news”. The sky was always falling, Henny Penny, and it all started to get to me. How could I ever pray enough for all these people and situations? I felt oppressed and guilty.
Then in early December, my son went into the hospital. I stayed there with him more or less full-time. I had only sporadic access to the internet. Therefore I was choosy where I spent my time (like being, say, here, instead of Google News).
Even amidst the stress of trying to cope with a very ill child, I could tell that having *less* information via the internet made a positive difference in my outlook. I emerged from the hospital a month later to discover that all sorts of crises and disasters had gone down without me. The world was pretty much lurching along like it always had.
Give it a try. Limit your internet roaming to three sites or so, none of them involving news or gossip. I promise you that you’ll still find out everything you *need* to know. And you’ll feel lighter and more free.
That was my PSA for the day. 🙂
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“Or the story just below it: Oprah Gushes Over Winslet’s Breasts.”
At first I just thought this was sarcasm, then I thought surely not, so I wend and checked. Yep. A “real” news story. 😦
I used to have a news station on in the background all the time in my home office. Then I just got fed up with the urgent news of the hour and turned it off. I’ve also gotten to where I tend to read most of the news paper 1 to 5 days behind real time. Allows me to skip over many “hot” stories that weren’t really.
But I know a lot of people who are continually obsessing about the latest “Obama will issue an executive order declaring us a Muslim state” or “George Bush has a secret way to not allow Obama to take office on Jan 20th.” or whatever. And many of these are Christians. Or so they think. Which they apparently don’t do very often.
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Did you ever try to live with out a T.V.? It upsets people. We married 30 years ago and had no TV. Our parents, both sides, thought us mad. Our friends thought we were too poor to buy one, so several times we came home to find a nice, used TV on the porch when some one upgraded.
When the kids came along we got a TV and a video player, but when the kids went to school they were social outcasts. so we got the cable. life was fine until one night when we were painting a bedroom late after work my ten year old daughter came in and said, “Mom, Dad, I love you and you need to wear condoms so you don’t get sick when you make love.” It was a Nickelodian Special, the kids channel, at 9 pm. So the cable left and I explained exclusive relationships and God’s will for our sex lives to my 10 yr. old daughter. I was hopping to wait till closer to puberty. Wow. We are back to watching a DVD once in a while and are the happier for it.
TV, take it or leave it, we left it.
I like talk radio,especially local, it has an off knob.
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This post makes me think about my papaw [on my Mom’s side].
He had maybe around a 7th grade education I think, practiced clean livin’, and looooooovvved to work outside on the land he owned.
However, even though he loved to work, I believe there was something symbolic about the way he drove his truck.
He went five miles under the speed limit and other people might have rolled their eyes or pitied him.
But I actually think they might be the ones who need to be pitied.
You see, I think that even though he was a hard worker, he did not live a “rushed” life.
I think he actually enjoyed his trips in the truck, looking at the land, and maybe breaking out that mountain song he used to sing–he scared me to death one time breaking out that song in the truck when it was silent.
Anyway, if you walked into my office right now, you’d see a big picture of papaw and a little boy on his lap.
I’ll see him again.
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It does seem that things were much more simple when I was younger before cable tv and mass media. The good ole days when all we had was black and white tv’s with bulbous screens and giant knobs, three channels , ABC ,CBS and NBC and maybe PBS. The big antenna on the roof with the rotor on top of the tv. I forget what time it was at night , but the stations would shut down for the evening around midnight or so. I don’t know why but I can vividly recall the video they would play at the end of the broadcast day of the airforce fighter and the poem written by some famous pilot from the past ,I forget his name. All I remember was that the plane was a F 104 starfighter , one of the early jets from 50’s or 60’s. That clip elicited a great feeling of patriotism and religeous sentiment in me as a kid,and after that we just went to bed. Life was better without the endless talking heads blabbing on endlessly about everything. Life is also better for me since I have cut way back on listening to Rush and never ending news and commentary. I know w need to be informed but enough is enough.
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“I mean, how do you reasonably argue that people should have LESS information about what’s going on in the world all the time?”
It’s a question of relevance.
Take stranger abductions, for instance. They just don’t happen that often, but because we get national personal interest stories we know about the few that do. We become afraid. We lock our kids up.
More than anything, all this information messes with relevance for most people. Certainly it’s great to be able to acquire information you need, but to be raised on a diet of largely irrelevant information that is being sold to you as relevant (and which you’ve bought as such) cannot be good.
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I’m really conflicted about this essay, not because I disagree with it in any way, but I’m quite sensitive to the fact that agreeing with it is really hard to defend. I mean, how do you reasonably argue that people should have LESS information about what’s going on in the world all the time? And yet, it seems obvious to me that the more we know about the sausage that is our political and social world, the less appetizing it is.
iMonk, I think your point about your father and what the Weather Channel would have done to him is a perfect cautionary example. I think we have a LOT of people in our society that are obsessed with politics as your Dad was with the weather, and it is literally driving them to distraction.
If it were just that we had a constant stream of INFORMATION spewing into our lives at all hours, it might not be such a problem, but it’s a soupcon of information stirred into a stew of nonsense and panic and manufactured outrage and controversy. Because just information won’t drive us crazy enough to keep tuning in. A 24-hour Greek Philosophers channel will never happen because it won’t create an on-air dust up over particulars v. universals.
And as for the Internet, well, I LOVE the internet. A lotta instant access to a lotta stuff. But again, 90% of it is garbage, posted by people who have no more business writing about what they are writing about than I have writing essays on particle physics or a commentary on the Upanishads. It is truly frightening that so many people “research” on the Internet. It must drive some college professors to distraction trying to counter the nonsense that some people “learn” there.
Did not one of the Founding Fathers say that the U.S. style of representative democracy was only fit to govern a moral people, and would be unfit for the governing of any other? Leaving aside the problems that any one may have with that statement, perhaps one could draw an analogy between it and the current world of communications and information technology – the 24/7 world of constant information is probably best fit to serve people who are intellectually honest and emotionally balanced, and is perhaps unfit for those who are not. Unfortunately, this is a fallen world, and perhaps fallen human beings having instantaneous communication with one another all over the planet is not the most desireable situation in some ways. But it is what it is, and we ain’t going back.
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“Sad revolution”? But now I know that all this coffee is good for me, or was that last year, or every other year? Oh well, at least I can have red wine – this year…
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😉
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Reading this post took me back to a discussion in Sunday School at the first church I served as a youth pastor. It was back in the time when Al Gore’s Internet had just recently been invented and MTV still showed music videos. One of the folks asked me if modern media and the influx of knowledge could be tied to Daniel 12:4: “But you, Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book until the time of the end; many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.â€
For all of the advances and benefits we get from the increasingly fast march of progress that K.W. noted, are we still able to get enough good out of it to break even or be “normal” like iMonk said?
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And so they’re talking about the end of the world — at least our kids aren’t having those phony air raid drills we’d be forced into weekly. Now there’s a good way to raise well adjusted children.
Simpler times my Aunt Tilly ….
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When we used to get only three channels clearly I would wake up at 5:30 on weekend mornings and watch the “snow” until the test pattern came on, then the flag waving as the National Anthem played and then get the only religion I ever had as one of the producers read the morning prayer and daily message to waving wheat. Then it was Modern Farmer and The Big Picture (WWII US Army films) and whatever else there was until The Little Rascals and cartoons came on.
I went to sleep every night to hear the local news and then Johnny Carson’s monologue through the paper thin walls in our Levittown house. Neither my sister nor I can fall asleep consistently unless the TV is on. WWII documentaries work best for me. The same one over and over.
And we were better off than our kids …?
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If someone is hearing me say there are no good uses of media, you’ve skipped some of the post. Obviously there are many. But those uses that are most shaping to who we are as humans are far from mostly the good uses.
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He’ll have his answer in seconds about how artists have rendered those creatures in the past, and he’ll have opinions galore about why those characters did what they did…and he’ll be right back in his book…without having to think or imagine on his own.
Or maybe he will use new media to create things you and I (and other adults) haven’t even dreamed about – good things at that.
While I wish news coverage was back at an early-mid 70s level, I’m no Luddite. In fact, there would be no convo here (and at a lot of other places) without new technology and media.
Maybe it’s just a question of balance?
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“Would you consider anyone who lives submerged into today’s media culture to have much of a dependable idea of what it means to be a normal human being?”
I think the definition of a “normal human being” is changing, and not for the better.
I understand the problem, and on the whole our lives might be worse off because of the “infoporn” at our fingertips. But, on the other hand, the easy exchange of information has allowed me to research my faith in ways not possible prior to the internet. My conversion required answers to questions about early Christian history that would be very difficult to find at my local library.
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All of this before the Weather Channel and the endless hype about weather on every television channel.
Weather Channel = All Global Warming, All The Time.
Shall we talk about pornography? The entertainment addicted personality? The damage to American health by the couch potato lifestyle? The philosophical relativism that lies at the heart of this construction of reality? The loss of our souls? The loss of simplicity and blissful ignorance?
Shall we talk of burnout?
Where all the Horrible Images of Earth-shaking Crisis blur into one until your only reaction is “YAWWWWWWWNNNNNNNNN…Who Cares?”
Where We’re All Gonna Die There’s No Way Out It’s All Over But The Screaming begets “I’m gonna grab for all I can before I feed the Maggots? The World’s Sliding Down The Crapper, I Might As Well Indulge Myself NOW?”
When the steady diet of Nihilism on Steroids drives you to suicide? Or crazy? Or totally-numbed Walking Dead?
Or drives you to a Savior — any Savior, who cares? — and you Bend the Knee/Burn the Pinch of Incense/Take The Mark On Forehead And Right Hand JUST TO MAKE IT STOP?
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Ranger…at least your son will read a book! Some of my grandchildren never read a book for enjoyment. So sad, considering the fact that their parent read constantly at their age. Instead, their lives revolve around their cell phones and tv and sports and their cell phones and tv and sports and…
OTH, I do have a lot of grandchildren who inhabit the local library and read way above their grade levels. They are the ones who seldom watch tv, but have healthy imaginations and whose lives tend toward LEGOs and books and art and friends…
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Sorry — sounded arrogant — surprised you left it up.
Trying to say that God is bigger than the problem, and our children don’t have the luxury of the nostalgia we baby-boomers do.
I’m trying to say that we need to find a way — individually and together — to the simplicity of experience in the midst of the turmoil. As an earlier post said — even if you don’t watch and listen to the talking heads, they “talk” to you at work or school through the people you see every day.
I try to find a way to see it all and still live in the simple Truth. I think that’s what God wants me to do.
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Good Post! The information overload has also made us more ignorant. We are able to access more information, but are not able to process it, be creative and actually “think” like generations before us. Furthermore, many have replaced their memory capacity with the hard drive on their computer and can’t access as much information personally without electronic assistance from their computer, iPhone, etc.
It’s a shame, but it has huge implications for how we train our children. My son will go to a public school like I did, but he will have a computer in his classroom beginning in 1st grade and will start learning how to substitute the world of his imagination for the world of someone else’s imagination that they’ve digitally programmed. His imagination will then become the same as the other students.
I remember reading the Narnia books in the 3rd grade and lying on my bed wondering what some of these creatures looked like. I remember wondering why certain characters did certain things. This is how we learn to imagine and think. My son will instead simply hop on his computer and search wikipedia. He’ll have his answer in seconds about how artists have rendered those creatures in the past, and he’ll have opinions galore about why those characters did what they did…and he’ll be right back in his book…without having to think or imagine on his own.
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>….I don’t think God is at all troubled by the modern media. I’ll take His POV on the subject ….
God really has his official press spokespersons around the IM blog these days.
Your official, divinely endorsed disagreement with the post has been registered.
Since I’m disagreeing with God, maybe I need to just take this post down.
“I’ll take God’s POV and the rest of you can keep chattering.” Now there’s a conversation stopper.
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No media was needed in the past for fostering racism, fear of anarchists, communists…
True dat! It used to be called Yellow Journalism.
There was a PBS doc on Annie Oakley a few years ago – turns out that William Randolph Hearst’s papers published story after story about how she was a cocaine addict. (They even tried an “entrapment” scheme.) She spent over 10 years traveling around the country, pursuing lawsuits intended to clear her name…
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Why stop at your parent’s world…? How about their parent’s world when the big threat was penny novels and peep shows? Keep going back to just before the Reformation when the first engine of mass media — i.e., the Gutenberg printing press — was invented.
Must have been nice back then, but the average lifespan was in the mid-40’s or so and abortions were not a problem because a goodly number of pregnancies did not go to term and a large percentage of children did not make it out of childhood. What made the difference is the ability to share information and study it because of mass media and communications.
I don’t think God is at all troubled by the modern media. I’ll take His POV on the subject ….
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Interesting observations.
On the subject of tv itself, ( I was born in ’58) our whole family could watch shows together, like Jackie Gleason or McHale’s Navy. I gravitate to retro channels showing obscure black and white shows.
As for 24 hour news hype, yes , you’re right,but bad information is bad information no matter what era you’re. The Spanish- American War was newspaper driven. Today,they’ll proclaim the Dow went up 25 points due to [ fill in blank] and you know the reporter did no research whatsoever.
People will believe what they want. No media was needed in the past for fostering racism, fear of anarchists, communists. Remember all the commie conspiracies?
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My parents don’t understand why I don’t have a TV at home; this post hits the nail exactly on the head.
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iMonk – I’ve been thinking about writing something on this myself. You stole the words from my brain! (I kid, I kid. ;))
We’re about the same age, and my memories of what TV – and TV newscasts – used to be like are much the same as yours. I’d be more than happy to go back to that, and see broadcast media take a part in life, but not dominate it.
My solution has been to avoid talk radio like the plague, never watch news channels, and restrict my TV viewing to things I really want to see. (I had to take a hard line with myself starting on 9/11, as I lived quite close to the Pentagon and really didn’t need to see footage of the twin towers played over and over – neither did anyone else, for that matter.)
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I get into arguments from time to time with my sister-in-law about whether or not the world is getting worse or better. She believes it’s getting worse, and by and large, the tremendous amount of bad-news media backs her up on this.
I, on the other hand, look at the 19th and 20th centuries and the horrific things we didn’t know about—that the media, in some cases, refused to report on—but were happening all the same. Loads more government corruption than there is now. Widespread drugs and alcohol. Legalized racism, sexism, slavery, prostitution, and lynching. Gangs running the local political parties. Cops that didn’t care when husbands beat their wives, and didn’t mind beating suspects either. Child abuse, child labor, child neglect. I haven’t even touched on the world wars.
A lot of these things have been cleaned up by the dedicated efforts of good Christians working in their local communities. In some cases the press even helped. But admittedly—I say this as a former reporter—the media, for all their self-delusions about how they’re helping society by uncovering evil, really don’t, and rarely do. Most reforms have been the result of motivated reformers who caught society’s attention regardless of the media. The media played along; it didn’t lead.
Human nature is just as evil as it’s always been, but now more people are standing up to oppose it. And now that a lot of it is being dealt with, the media has nothing better to report on than celebrity scandals… and the occasional terrible crime that would have been nothing out of the ordinary in the 1800s.
But if people have no basis for comparison—if they don’t know history outside of movies and TV—of course they’d think all our bad news means the world is coming to an end. And if they’re pre-millennial in your eschatology, they’d want to believe it, too… and will probably dismiss everything I just wrote as an over-optimistic, even demonic, delusion.
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That’s a joke. I promise. I never listen to Federally imprisoned Cryptozoologists.
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100 hours of Kent Hovind??????? Get a life!
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Clark,
I’m looking for where I blamed anyone for anything. I’m missing it.
The whole culture changed. All of us bought into it. Some more. Some less.
You are surely aware that on any given day James Dobson can say jump and 90% of the Christians you work with come in with knots on their heads from hitting the ceiling.
If BOR says take over the government, there will be a pile of people you know marching with pitchforks.
But more germane to my post is the fact that we now assume that media is a legitimate way to spend vast portions of our lives: typing tens of thousands of blog posts in my case. Others mileage may vary.
Media tells us what is going on. What is normal. What we want. Who has it. Why we need it. What’s wrong. What’s right. What’s what.
It’s a different media world than my parents world.
If anyone is to blame, it is most surely me, even though I watch 2 shows a week. (House and 24) But I live in cyberspace where, btw, I have 100 hours of Kent Hovind videos downloaded…..
peace
ms
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Talk radio (directed hot air) has probably done as much damage as the News Channel. And so-called Christian talk radio is worse still. But excuse me…I have to check out the Yahoo headlines about the Ninja cat.
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Thing is, the kiddies are growing up with adapted filters for this sort of guff. They seem to be able to automatically filter the worst of it without noticing.
The net natives (born mid to late 90s)grew up developing these filters which even the net pioneers (born 70s and 80s)don’t have. And they know how to use what’s left after the unconcious filters have done thier job, while the folk of your parent’s era just ignore it all as unintelligable (mostely).
Could it be that we in the middle, between your parents and my kids, are just struggling because we developed pre-information age filters and expectations?
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I noticed this “breaking news” phenomenon shaping up while the O.J. Simpson case was going on. Then 9/11 of course really ramped things up. Now every incident, from a local car chase to a tornado, is “breaking news” for everybody in the country. Even 20 years ago, most of these incidents would only have been on the local news at the most.
Same thing with the environment. After Communism fell in Russia and Eastern Europe in the late 80s/early 90s, all of a sudden we seemed to be hearing more about Earth Day, global warming, etc. Its as if one crisis (Communist nuclear threat) just had to be replaced with another (the environment) in order for the media to justify its existence.
As the traditional mass media continue their decline in the era of the internet, they continue to ratchet up the crisis rhetoric to let us know that we REALLY need them to tell us all this terrible stuff.
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“Last week, one of the major internet news outlets did a front page piece on 5 ways the world might end. Have a nice day America.”
Oh, I know which one that is. It’s the same one which claims to be America’s conservative news outlet, but most of the news articles on the front page of its website are all about sex scandals, cheerleaders, bikinis, etc. A few years ago when a famous porn start died, they kept playing semi-dressed video images of her over and over again on their cable news show. My family was sitting in a restaurant on a Sunday afternoon that had their TV’s tuned to this channel when this was going on; it was embarassing. I guess I should have told the manager that I was offended, but would that have appeared anti-conservative? A notable conservative was recently interviewed on this news channel, and she blasted them for spending so much time on sex-related news stories. The anchors’ responses were basically, “We have to give the people what they want”. Relevancy at its finest.
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[Moderator edited]
Yes, I understand and can appreciate that at some point in the information age we moved into the stage of “infoglut.” There is so much information available that no one person could possibly process it all. But how much of the problem/solution is up to the individual consumer?
I listened to one of my friends (who has a few years on me, perhaps) say that he’s never been on MySpace or Facebook. His reasoning is that he has enough crap in his life to work through without knowing about everybody else’s. For him, this may be the case. For me, Facebook has found dozens of people I went to high school and college with that I’m glad to make contact with again. I have old friends with wives, children, careers etc. that just a month ago I did not know about. [Moderator edited]
Television is much the same. [Moderator edited] Personally, we haven’t had t.v. for about 7 years. If we did have I wouldn’t get to watch it much. But that point aside: television is a tool, a resource, and it’s your to use. The beauty of having 700 channels is that [a person] can watch the ones [he/she] chooses. If [a person] think Spongebob is stupid and only wants to see Bugs Bunny cartoons from the 1950’s, check out Boomerang from Cartoon Network. When we had t.v. I was never the least upset by Bill O’Riley because I never once watched his show. [Moderator edited]
Collectively our society has gained too many pounds and watches too many hours of television each week. The blame, however, still lies with each individual holding the remote, not some television consortium that told us we “had” to do anything. [Moderator edited]
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I’d like to respond, but if I take time to do so, I might miss “breaking news,” news that probably has miniscule possiblity of actually affecting me, or you, but, hey, it’s “breaking news.”
Did anyone ever listen to Gary Burbank who retired from WLW in Cincinnati in December ’06? He used to do a bit on news with one of his sidekicks where they said something like “We’re Geraldo Rivera types who believe that your right to know supercedes your right to exist.” He would also break in to the show as Dan Buckles (a take off on Dan Rather) with some piece of nonsense). I took this as his way of satirizing just what you mention in this post.
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