Life in the Post-"News" Era

With virtual information at our fingertips, is it necessary to have the "news" now -- or increasingly, what the powers that be, and hoped always to remain so, wish us to know? But first, they have to establish their credibility that what they offer is vital to know -- before supplementing those essentials, with what they merely want us to know (advertising and "public service" announcements).

Increasingly, that has come to be dominated by what the special interests were highly motivated to want us know to entice us to begin or continue patronage with them, particularly the political parties, government worker unions that lobby tirelessly for increased funding for their own benefit in the guise of doing it for everybody else but themselves, in addition to the overt promotions and marketing done by enterprises hoping to increase their traffic, interest and business.

The latter, would be the new, while the former, would be the old, reported as the "news." The familiarity story now would run along the lines that the school children are now doing poorly and falling behind (despite the traditional solution of being in school), so what is now needed, are even more people, at increasingly higher salaries -- because the present solution, is not working, but in fact failing.

Obviously, the simple solution would be to find a new solution to replace the old one, and not simply add on to the old one, and then when the new idea didn't work as well as hoped (any new idea will work as a novelty and the enthusiasm it generates), then more will be added onto what is not working well, and so of course, one is doing so much that doesn't work, that it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish what is working from what isn't any longer, and the whole process seems pointless and random, except for the frequency of our affirmations, that that is the most necessary practices to continue -- beyond questioning.

So when there is a disruption to those continuities, there are moments to reflect, what are essentials to that task, and what no longer needs doing -- and may actually be integrated into other functions implicitly, and so has become redundant and unnecessary.

In previous times, change and innovation was so slow (or at least our awareness of them was), that what we learned in those times, could usually be the truths that would serve us our entire lifetimes. Then the pace quickened with the newspapers, and then the news -- until finally, we have virtual information when something new is merely what we haven't personally learned about yet.

Not that it did not happen already -- but that those who bring us the latest, greatest thing happening, haven't themselves gotten around to discovering that, and reporting that as the valuable thing to know, but instead, tell us increasingly, what is unnecessary to know because they can no longer determine the useful from the useless, and have become victims of their own propaganda.