Ahoy from
Amoy! (historic
Xiamen, China).
How often do we say "No news is good news"--yet still glue our eyeballs to the newspaper, TV or online news? Thanks to modern tech we can despair at wars and rumors of wars in every corner of the globe. So why inflict this upon ourselves? And make no mistake--most of the news is bad because we thrive on bad news, not good.
Several TV stations, including one in Russia, tried showing only good news. Viewers praised them--and within a week had switched to other channels. We enjoy bad news as much as picking at a scab, and then sharing--often multiplying--that bad news with others. It reminds me of an odd aunt who delighted in showing everyone her surgery scars and elaborating upon every sordid detail of her recovery.
C.S Lewis wrote that he was thankful his father did not have a car because it allowed him as a child to explore the world at a human pace. Modern transportation not only annihilated distance but also wonder and adventure. If modern transport annihilated distance, modern media has cremated the corpse of distance and scattered it to the winds. Thanks to the internet, misfortunes in distant nations are as immediate, and gut-wrenching, as those of our neighbor--for a few moments, at least.
Some research suggests our attention span is decreasing. We are in need of constant, changing stimulus, 24/7, and when nothing occupies our thoughts, we reach for the phone or PC, priding ourselves on how we can multi-task, as if bus
yness is synonymous with good business. But it doesn't work--or at least it doesn't work well.
Myth of Multitasking. I remember the first time I heard the word "multi-task." I asked a banker if I could write one check for two purposes and he said, "Yes, you may multi-task that check if you wish." Hello? China to earth? I thought I was talking to someone from another planet. But multi-tasking today is the "norm"--even though it is impossible to do effectively.
We are not biologically or neurologically capable of more than one task, at least well, at the same time. Don't believe it? Look up the statistics on auto accidents caused by texting--or pedestrians who die by stepping in front of oncoming cars (or even off a San Diego cliff) while texting.
We can't multi-text or multi-task. And we can't, while remaining sane, multi-news--bearing the news, simultaneously, of the entire world from multi-sources. It's hard enough to keep pace with our own problems, but the entire world's as well? So why not axe the news--at least that news that is irrelevant, or that we can do nothing about. And limit the time (and times) that we view the news? It has been proven that the most effective people limit their time online (many of them, for example, only reading emails once or twice a day).
By axing (or at least trimming) the news, I'm not saying to ignore the world! Some events do affect us, but most do not, and even those that do are often things we can do nothing about except worry--and worry is often just paying compound interest on a debt that is either not ours to repay or may never come due. Don't believe me? Make a list of 10 things that worry you today and then look back at it 1 year later and see if most of those worries weren't just pebbles in a shoe that felt like
Sysyphus' boulder.
My Gulf War Lesson--Embedded Reporters, Embedded Viewers What opened my eyes to the utter insanity of 24/7 news was Chinese media coverage of the first Gulf War. There wasn't any coverage! Sure, China Daily had small pieces, but it took us 4 days to get the newspaper. I learned later that friends and family back home in the U.S. had followed the "embedded reporters" so closely that they had become embedded viewers (to the point that some fell ill).
China News As for me in China, by the time I knew the Gulf War was really serious, the really frightening part (for us at least) was over and I had avoided the gut-wrenching agony that assailed my friends back home. It was a great lesson for me, and from that time on, I determined to just skim the headlines but not read them in-depth unless it was 1), something directly applicable to me, and 2) something I could do something about. Some will say, of course, that I can pray about everything--but in fact that is as impossible as multi-tasking. Not even Christ himself, while in human form, prayed about everything, or healed every person he met; are we less limited than he?
I noted earlier
C.S. Lewis' comments on modern transportation. Now I'd like to finish with his insights on the futility and inanity making school children reading the news--but I think his arguments could be made for us adults as well! There is, of course, a place for news, for keeping informed so we can make informed decisions (especially regarding voting). But we need balance.
I learned the hard way that I can do more in 6 days than 7. I've also learned that, with news,
less can be more.
C.S. Lewis on Making Schoolboys Read the Newspapers.
Yet, even so,
I can hardly regret having escaped the appalling waste of time and spirit which would have been involved in reading the war news or taking more than an artificial and formal part in conversations about the war. To read without military knowledge or good maps accounts of fighting which were distorted before they reached the Divisional general and further distorted before they left him and then "written up" out of all recognition by journalists, to strive to master what will be contradicted the next day, to fear and hope intensely on shaky evidence, is surely an ill use of the mind.
Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy read there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.
Enjoy
Amoy!
Dr.
Bill
www.amoymagic.com
Bill Brown
Xiamen University
www.amoymagic.com
Ahoy from Amoy! (historic Xiamen, China).
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