Perspective, News, Media

I think the single most important development in the last century is the widespread and nearly instant access to news, entertainment, and information from throughout the world. Television started it, cable TV advanced it, and the Internet strapped a rocket to its butt and lit the fuse. One odd little consequence of media proliferation is the selection of stories. Coupled with vast population increases, information sharing has changed drastically.

A hundred years ago, a person in a small town got most of their local news over the fence (gossip), and got their business/politics news from the papers. The proportion of stories would be fairly similar to the proportion of events that impacted a community (albeit with a slight emphasis on scandal and a bit of inaccuracy in gossip). So if one house was burglarized, the average person heard about one house being burglarized. If a house in another town was burglarized, that burglary would be reported in their local news. When I was growing up in the 1970s, parents worried about their children being stolen. Was it because child disappearances were an epidemic? No. It was because child disappearances seemed like an epidemic when every news-watching person in every town in America heard about virtually all of the (still rare) child disappearances happening throughout the country. Television made all news feel local.

Then you throw population increases into the mix, and the world feels mighty dangerous, indeed. Even if child disappearances held steady at (I'm totally making this number up out of thin air) 1 per 10,000 population, every time the population doubled, that would mean that the number of cases doubled. In 1930, our population was less than 3 million; today, it is over 300 million. That's 100 times more people. If long-term trends continued unchanged, that should represent 100 times more crimes, 100 times more illnesses, 100 times more divorces, 100 times more marriages and church picnics and everything else that is, generally, proportional to population.

Our perception of risk has jumped off the deep end. Some kid shoots himself while playing with grandpa's gun and the story is different through the TV lens. A hundred years ago, if you heard over the fence that little Johnny shot himself accidentally, you knew little Johnny and you knew he was an idiot. Now, you hear about it on TV and the reporter doesn't mention that little Johnny is an idiot, and a lot of people respond with "we need a law to keep that from happening to my kid!" Pretty soon, we have a lot of laws to protect normal kids from abnormal risks, and we get into a legal game of one-upmanship. "By golly, if it's illegal to talk on a cell phone while driving, it out to be illegal to ____ [fill in the blank]. That's WAY more dangerous!"

Perspective has been completely destroyed. Our brains have to filter out information just to survive (imagine if you couldn't ignore all of the conversations at other tables in a restaurant), and we alternately filter out anything that affects "the rich," "the poor," "minorities," "majorities" and various groups we aren't in, we filter out anything affecting an irrelevant number of people (only 1,000 dead? that's not news), and then we filter in anything intolerable-but-possible (children dying? I couldn't stand to have my child die!).

Maybe every newscast should end with a shot of perspective. "20 people have been diagnosed with the possible killer flu. In other news, 299,999,935 Americans probably don't have killer flu. 299,999,600 Americans have not been kidnapped, and 140,000,000 Americans did not pay any Federal income tax this year. 298 Million Americans have not been killed or seriously injured in an industrial accident, while 400,000 Americans have been laid-off as their jobs shipped to nations that do not try to outlaw every possible danger. Thank you, and Good night."