So Much for the Information Age

Where is this? Think quick, it's a town that's been recently ravaged by flood waters. The clean up and rebuilding will cost billions and take months. Hundreds dead...

New Orleans? Nope.
Guffport? Nope.
Biloxi? You're not even getting warmer.

This picture is of flood damage that occurred last week in Brienz, Switzerland. If I didn't have a friend in Zurich, I wouldn't even have known about this, that's how much press it got in the U.S.

Full disclosure: I do not watch TV as a rule, so I wouldn't have seen it on the news except as second hand smoke. And since I don't have cable or a dish, if the network affiliates or national broadcast networks didn't run it, I wouldn't see it if I watched TV all the time. Slovenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Germany, these countries were hit too, and it wasn't news. I even get e-mail versions of the NY Times & Washington Post, though I mainly tend to skim them for headlines of interest, reading an article here and there. I don't know if they covered it prior to 8/27, the oldest ones I haven't deleted from Outlook, but the ones I still have don't have a single headline on the subject.

Which gets to the root of why I spend so little time consuming 'news.' I get a small dose of NPR going to and from work, sometimes stream it on my headphones at work (which, come to think of it, I did quite a bit of last week, so there's another outlet that kept mum). I get the e-mails of the day's headlines from a couple of newspapers, but basically by ignoring the news media, I'm not substantially more ignorant of current events than I would be if I devoted lots of time and energy to it.

Basically, 'reading the paper,' or watching the TV news, this shit just creates the illusion of being informed. A handful of people decide what they want you to think, and release the information that will lead you to think it. In an age where there is more bandwidth, more resources available for the dissemination of knowledge than at any time in history.