A.D.D.
Recently I was holed up in a hotel room in Anchorage waiting either for winter ice to break or the fever from the flu I brought up from the Lower 48. Occasionally I’d pull back the covers from over my head and turn on the cable TV that filled half my room. Forty odd channels and I do mean odd. But eventually I narrowed the realistic choices down to a couple of old movie stations, one comedy channel and two so-called news programs. Let’s just say, when I recover from the flu and winter and far too much television, I won’t be subscribing to cable or Dish.
The ‘news’ programs were a definite challenge. Granted that I was feverish, headachy and wasted, but it was a chore to watch a screen split between the commentator and the interviewed with moving identifiers replaced by captions moving constantly, the Dow Jones ticker running on top next to the channel logo with a news crawl plus a text message site and folks tweeting or texting or some damn thing incessantly creeping into consciousness at the bottom of the screen. This is certainly news for the seriously delirious — a never ending stream of competing images, verbiage and numbers that interrupt any possibility of focus or concentration. Stories blurred into each other, jostled for my attention before suddenly veering into a ‘breaking’ story, then swung suddenly into a preview for an upcoming talking head, usually two heads with still more identifiers and in case I was curious, who won the football games NFL Sunday.
I have admitted I was sick. But is this really the way we want to get our information, us healthy citizens of the 21st digital century? By jamming it all on to an LCD screen willy nilly and mixing it with the Waring Blender to a digestible pablum that gives us a 30 minute FDA approved daily requirement of news, sports and weather in one delicious gulp?
If Marshall McLuhan was right and the medium, not the content, is the message, better buy stock in pharmaceuticals, the ones searching for a cure for attention deficit disorder. We’re all, I think, a little fevered these days….