Monday, February 03, 2014

Increasingly,


...how I feel about "the news".

Alain de Botton is one of the few public atheists I've got the time of day for. He seems to be trying very hard to explain the world, particularly the modern world, and answer the same questions religious people ask, in a way that atheists can understand. Lately, he's been having a go at the world of the media.


It feels like there is always an infinite amount of news, so much is happening in the world every day. A newspaper could be 1,000 pages long and hardly scratch the surface. Perhaps if you really cared about the news, you'd read more and more of it?

Yet there's a strange thing that goes on. After a while it becomes clear that the same kinds of events are recurring again and again. The details of the story change, but the core issue is the same.

For me, the news isn't just my living, it's my life.

I've often said that I've spent the last ten to fifteen years writing the same news story over and over. I wonder if that is such a very good thing...



~

1 comment:

SPC said...

It sounds like we have a faster version of what Solomon spoke of in the Book of Ecclesiastes, 1:9-10:

What is it that hath been? the same thing that shall be. What is it that hath been done? the same that shall be done. Nothing under the sun is new, neither is any man able to say: Behold this is new: for it hath already gone before in the ages that were before us.