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Warning: Discerning diet is urgent as we binge on useless fast-food information
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THE global hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 jetliner over the past 20 days has only added to the mystique surrounding that eerie incident.
We have remained essentially in the dark about exactly what happened after the loss of contact with the plane in the small hours of March 8.
So far the futility of the hunt hints more at the inadequacy of human technology.
The scarcity of solid revelations from the search easily gave rise to various theories about conspiracies, accusations of deliberate coverups, and charges of insensitivity.
The dearth of quality information provided by Chinese reporters also attests to their inadequacy in a global, competitive media environment.
While they lack established source contacts with US and British intelligence, aviation and technology experts, they also do not appear to have talked with other independent experts, demonstrating a lack of initiative.
In their inability to sort through information, some have been much engaged in reciting what they had learned at press conferences, and in depicting the pathos of distraught relatives of the passengers. In the midst of their reports, quite a few of the journalists managed to work themselves up to an emotional and occasionally indignant pitch, at a time when their Western counterparts are busy sifting through the chaos of information, and managed to come up with some truly revealing findings.
Addictive qualities
That’s probably easy to understand.
Most of these Chinese reporters are too young not to be overwhelmed by the inundation of information emanating from this mysterious event. In their eagerness to appear useful, they make up for their lack of solid reporting, questioning and insight with cheap and overblown sentimentality.
As Clay A. Johnson observes in his “The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption,” too much information, like too much food, is bad for your health.
Johnson says, “Today, you’re likely to spend upwards of 11 hours per day consuming information.”
Excessive consumption of information negatively affects your attention span and stress levels. Given the multiple electronic tools available — smart phones, laptops, tablets, weibo, WeChat — only the most determined can successfully fight e-enslavement.
Many victims — including our reporters — feel constantly compelled to click on every mail, respond to every text message, or spend hours monitoring updates on what their friends eat, see, and hear.
Most of the information, like junk food, is filled with empty calories that weigh you down and clog your mental arteries.
One former newspaper executive has compared Facebook’s addictive qualities to crystal meth.
The effect of the Internet on the moral fiber of our society deserves more study and, probably, regulation.
To simple observers, Internet holds the false promise of being emancipating.
As Eli Pariser explains in his book “The Filter Bubble,” your web activity creates a trail that enables content providers to tailor material specifically for you and to expose you only to “homogenized” information with which you already agree.
Tailored information
“As information becomes more and more tailored, it becomes harder for us to resist pursuing it, and our attention banks carry smaller and smaller balances,” Johnson observes.
Spam filters and similar software may give you some protection, but they are increasingly inadequate given the many channels of information you are exposed to. A truly intelligent information consumer would require a behavioral shift, in that they themselves must take responsibility for determining what is beneficial and what to ignore.
Content providers should also be held morally responsible for creating information with a prior view to its social impact.
“The websites of all content providers are designed to keep you reading and to expose you to the most advertising impressions possible,” the author observes.
Our reporters, instead of falling prey to information overload, should play a leading role as gateway to quality information.
They should be more valued as thinking and enlightened content providers.
Of course, that’s difficult at a time when they are called upon by media owners to churn out material intended to deliver solid ratings, readership, clicks and handsome profits.
Providing thoughtful and necessary content is also a challenge in a profession in a sense struggling on the brink of extinction.
At least for many ambitious Chinese newspaper reporters, career progress means elevation into corporate PR, and a gauge of their maturity is generally their dexterity in planting PR verbiage in news stories.
These circumstances will only further compromise quality journalism.
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