Does anyone know how to disable the news column on your Facebook newsfeed? You know the little column that gives you 30-word blurbs about various nonsense happening in the world today? You know what I am talking about? It usually keeps me up to date on important things that qualify as “news” like, what Kanye West is up to, what no-name reporter is apologizing for a remark that most people did not even know about, or, my personal favorite, what Sarah Palin’s daughter is doing (This thing does not pull up results based on your interests, right?). I am glad I have this little column of “trending” news to keep me up to date. How else would I be able to stay knowledgeable on all these important current events?
Okay, I exaggerate and I realize many of you do not pay much attention to the various bits of attention-seeking sound bites that breed in social media. The wider world clearly does pay attention though. While the current antics of musicians or politically irrelevant daughters aren’t particularly damaging bits of information, they don’t exactly provide the much-needed context to the busy world of current events. We could hardly say they even qualify as news. The real problem is that whatever happens to be “trending,” (I guess that is to say “popular?”) is not necessarily what is important. Also when did hashtags become acceptable titles for news articles? Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon.
Let’s be serious here: most reasonable people can agree that any endemic problem in our society is remarkably complex, be it racism, a Social Security system that will go broke in the foreseeable future, or the political complexities of the Middle East, pick nearly anything in the world and it cannot be summed up in a hashtag or a blurb. Yet, our news not only has become “Look what this outrageous thing this absurd person said,” but in many ways it has simply become irrelevant. The things that need reporting seem oddly absent. We are remarkably concerned with the political correctness of attention seeking people and have comparatively less patience for, oh I don’t know, the number of people who die in car accidents every year, which is somewhere north of 30,000.
So why, oh why, do we put up with this crap? Do we just not have the patience for the news anymore? Something could definitely be said for the shortening of our national attention span. We seem to have tragically begun confusing our entertainment for the news. That is not to say people in other political camps have somehow avoided this problem either. The rise of the Internet and its children — the tweet and the status — have infected our perception of “staying up to date.” Not too long ago the only mediums for being attuned to the comings and goings of the world were the newspaper and television. But who has the time to read the paper anymore? And who wants to watch a news program where you actually have to listen along? With the rampancy of social media we have deputized any incompetent’s Buzzfeed article so that is carries the weight of a journalist’s work. How many of you remember the #CancelColbert wildfire that effectively started with a young woman misunderstanding a joke and the resulting witch-hunt to end the Colbert Report? And that’s only one example, go take a look at your newsfeed, or YikYak or Twitter and see all the inane, nonsensical things that for some reason, we take seriously.
The “millennial” generation, which I guess we have been dubbed, has been quick to adopt and vigorously protect social media and Internet freedoms. It has become something that has defined our generation. Yet we have been incredibly hesitant to see any flaws in this new, lightning quick, information typhoon. “Information” on its own we intrinsically see as good, but that does not mean we have to value it all equally. Nor does it mean more is always better. Something like ISIS takes more than a few articles to understand, something like American politics demands vigorous, in-depth, debate to function. Whether it is a global phenomenon or our own institutions, we lose something valuable when arguments or “the news” can be summed up in a tweet. We should never silence voices, but we can discern which ones truly deserve our attention. Do I really care that Reddit thinks the ravings of a delusional state senator are important? We can change the debate by simply not giving credence to the nonsense. The most constructive thing we can do is talk about the issues we know to be real and let the attention-seeking, the nonsensical and the foolish be shouted unnoticed.
