I apologize in advance for the click-bait title, but I promise you it is relevant to the general gist of this post!
These days, we talk a lot about “fake news” and about the difficulty of finding out what is really happening in the world; in our communities.
I can’t help but think that a significant part of our “problem” these days is that whereas we say that we want the facts, the deeper truth is that “just the facts” often tend to be somewhat mundane and boring, and not exactly the sort of news that’s a headline grabber.
On the other hand, when we take something very plain and dress it up in a headline of HUGENESS and HORROR, then we can suddenly get people’s attention. But then — of course — they suddenly expect to find a horrendous story inside… and won’t take anything seriously unless we can deliver on the headline.
The sad effect is that the horrible headline ends up supplanting the somewhat more basic truth that gave rise to it, in the first place.
Our collective skins have become thick; we have grown accustomed to everything being horrible and overblown; we have become so jaded that little short of cannibalism or a nuclear waste spill in our neighborhood actually gets our attention, anymore.
I remember sometime back in the late 1980's I heard the term "infotainment" for the first time — the word used to describe the concept we have become familiar with in our current time: Keeping people entertained is actually more important than disseminating the facts.
I also remember distinctly thinking that it was a stupid idea to require news to be "entertaining," because most news tends NOT to be.
On some level, it actually feels somewhat shameful!
On a more serious not, though, it sometimes really does feel like we're on "final approach" to something that resembles the reality portrayed in the film "Idiocracy."
No "sensationalist" headlines are nothing new, but they used to primary be the domain of tabloid "news rags," not mainstream media. Sometimes I'm not entirely sure where this world is headed...
Thanks for reading, and have a great remainder of your week!
How about YOU? Do you think we have become more drawn to sensationalism? Does it take more than it used to to hold people's attention? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — NOT A CROSSPOST!!!)
Created at 20210513 23:30 PDT
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Or maybe this is a sort of a system law that 20% of people must have 80% of information while 80% of people have only 20%.
"Infotainment" is a way to keep most people ignorant in the age when information is easily accessible. I hope it is. Otherwise, it might be a "final approach" to "Idiocracy".
I also think that the human race has faced something new. I got a theory that, since recent times, we have a common information system in the world. People have been united into the big info system first time in history. Probably, the Australian bushfires were the first event that broke the remains of the walls. I travelled much and I have facebook friends from Asian countries like India, Thailand, Vietnam, China as well as ex-Soviet countries, Eastern and Western Europe. I was surprised that right everybody was involved in the drama. I have never experienced this before.
So, when information seas (national info spaces) combine in one, we are getting a global info ocean. And the difference between a sea and an ocean is that we never have tsunamis in the Baltic or Black Sea.
Covid made us forget the grade of insanity Australian bushfires brought. There was a huge drama. But what news gave us was much more.
Animals burning alive - literally billions of koalas and kangaroos, people that can't breathe, a child in a gas mask...
The source of the photo: Girl in a gas mask, holding a koala: The truth behind that viral Australian bush fires photo
When I see this image that resembles a photograph from the satellite (below)... And I told myself this could be only a fake. Maybe, because I studied geography at university.
Meanwhile, many friends from FB believed that Australia became a piece of burning charcoal. People felt we lost Australia and that the climate will finish the Earth quite soon.
(Don't forget also that many people from all sort of authoritarian countries, disappointed with their own societies, states and media, trust Western media a bit more than they deserve.)
So this was the first time when facebook and google got involved in making news (instead of being just platforms for spreading information) and started to fight against fakes. Covid and Trump-vs-Baiden were 2 more global info tsunamis.
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We like sensation, events, shocking news. That everything attract attention. Sometimes I notice that the content of such much promising headlines have nothing to do with it and even sometimes boring. But that is our modern world :)
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