Has "Now...This" Turned Into "Now, This"?
Chapter 7 of Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves To Death" talks about how news on TV is disjointed. Our attention is only focused on one tragic story at a time for less than a minute. Then the news station says "Okay, that's enough of that sad story. We're going to cut to commercial then come back and tell you another sad story!". But, it seems like there isn't much of a pause in the stories anymore, no ellipses, no time to digest the information thrown at us. It's making me think that perhaps the ellipses between "Now...This" has turned into a comma, meaning that we only have time for a breath before we're plunged into another news story. Sometimes it feels like we might not even have that.
Generation Z gets all of their news from social media. Instead of having a commercial break to break up the stories, we scroll through our feed and see article after article of the same story. This has been called "doom scrolling" meaning that we don't ever really have a breather when looking at the news. I know that "doom scrolling" means getting news through a different medium than the one Postman is talking about, but I think that they somewhat go together. So, do you think that we've lost the time to digest one news story before listening about another or not?
I think that, firstly, the tone of the news disarms us emotionally. Because the anchors speak of tragedy and disaster with adjunctly composed, straight faces, we learn to take tragedy with a grain of salt instead of alarm and dismay. The missing proper emotional response prevents us from properly taking in information, and then, of course, the short time of the segments furthers the detachment from issues. In one of my Honors classes, one student said that viewing black injustices as a white person is like "looking through a window"-- you can always look away or close the window when it's not convenient for you. The news does something similar, opening and closing imaginary blinds to keep us from truly examining and processing (negative) information.
ReplyDeleteI believe this is important to the success of televised news because it's not very entertaining to lose all hope with all the riots, injustice, and disasters sweeping the earth. However, THIS is exactly why people are misinformed or underinformed about racism, sexism, rape culture, profiling, and more--the news, who is supposed to present it as SERIOUS, important information to change out thinking, simply gives it a trivial mention and then moves on to the "heartwarming story of the week"--somebody knitted hats for some babies, or something else that's meaningless.
We physically have not lost the time to actually digest a story, but I think it's safe to say technology has developed in such a way that this is the case. I know that whenever I scroll through Twitter and something big has just happened I see post after post about it, meaning I can't possibly get away from it. Back to the main question...yes. We have lost the time.
ReplyDeleteI do think we've lost the time to digest one news story before listening to another one. I think it almost makes us numb to terrible news. "Oh, another shooting" or "oh, another tragic event": we almost don't feel anything after hearing these stories anymore. Scrolling through story after story makes it harder to actually process information, which one reason we have an intense public discourse issue.
ReplyDeleteBefore reading the “Now...This” chapter and your blog post, I never realized how quickly news channel anchors change from one story to another. I believe we have lost the time to digest one news story before hearing another. People that watch the news on TV receive story after story in such a short frame of time that viewers may not be able to comprehend every story. Based on the length of each story and how many sad stories are provided, viewers may not understand the severity of each story. I understand that in today’s world, many people have short attention spans. This may be the reason why news channels only present each story for about a minute. Even though short stories may be due to short attention spans and/or the number of stories needed to be presented, people may not take a story as seriously as they would if a story was presented for a longer period of time.
ReplyDeleteI think it depends on the situation. For people today, I think it is easy to ignore some stories, but then focus heavily on the ones that we care about. It really depends on the person and the situation. With social media bringing the news to our fingertips, it does seem like the "Now...This" segments are becoming cliche and obsolete. Since we get to scroll through our news now, we can decide on where we want to spend our time looking instead of listening to the ramblings of a news broadcast. It is interesting to analyze how many people actually react to the news. We have become so desensitized to the sad and angering stories that it is like the news has become obsolete since we are no longer willing to take as much action as we used to. Although there are certainly news stories that may stir us, there are some news stories that we just hear all to often.
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