Panic Buttons

In all honesty, I watch as little news as possible. I typically look at a newspaper or turn on the TV maybe once a week to find out what is going on in the world if I have not already been informed. Ignorance is bliss and I am full of it.

The news is extremely depressing and I doubt many would disagree with me on that. Why can’t the headlines read: “6,525,170,264 people survived today! Only 107 passed away!”? That would be so much more enlightening than hearing another suicide bomber in Iraq had killed another six people.

After reading both Ana and Sebastian’s posts, I tend to agree with both of them to some extent. I, like Sebastian, have tried to cut the media out of my life for the most part. I have not replaced my TV with a fish tank yet, (how else am I going to watch Grey’s Anatomy and the endless reruns of Friends?) though it is a rather pleasant idea.

However, if we all took the fish tank approach to life, I can not help but wonder what would come of the world? It seems difficult to completely cut the media out of your life. I would argue that the media is an important part of our lives but it is a question as to whether it is completely necessary for it to be focused on the negative all the time. The news typically provides an overload of dreadful stories and images that are overly discouraging that also instill a fear in us regarding the evils of the world and give us little hope of there being good. This instilled fear is being argued as the cause of many of our panic buttons.

As pointed out by several people now, fear is a great motivator. Having absolutely no fear seems to be a rather dangerous thing. On one hand, if we prepare ourselves for the worst and the worst doesn’t occur, then we are unbelievably thankful for what we have. If we expect perfection from our lives and our surroundings as an attempt to live a life in complete bliss, if any minor thing goes wrong we are more likely to freak out being unprepared to deal with what has happened and making the situation appear a disaster. On the other hand, is it necessary to live a life with all this fear instilled in us?

It seems there may be a fine line between knowing too much and not knowing enough with today’s media. I live my life in bliss and fear at the same time. When taking the ‘fish tank approach’ and attempting to avoid the media as much as possible, I like to imagine that the world is a happy place where nothing is going wrong. However, I am still intelligent enough to accept the fact that this is far from the truth.

The media is an important source of information, but does it always have to be so negative? There are good things in the world that happen once in a while. If we did not constantly focus on the bad, and added some good to our daily dosage of media, maybe the bad would shock us even more and that itself would cause us to want to take action. Instead we get an overload of bloody war scenes and the constant scare of terrorism and global warming.