News and Noise

With floods of data, it is not surprising that the number-one skill for living and thriving is how to curate information. Turning trash into treasure. Building our own filters, constructing our own “firewalls”. With the abundance of affordable chipset, people are hoarding images, video, audio and data way above their personal consumption level. Digital glut. At this exponential growth rate, video will be stacked up all the way to Mars in just a few years. Be discernible. Select your battle and be discriminative on how you dispense your meager attention. Start giving instead of just taking (Goodwill data site? Hey, you can read this e-book & watch this video on my dime).

We are to be self-directed and not giving to the sway of public opinion: circle of friends, collection of likes and LinkedIn invites. “Walled-off” postings and homogenous connection lead to cultural insulation. Had the Internet existed around the same time as electricity, we wouldn’t have the American society as we now know. People would be talking in circles and among themselves (tribal groups).

BTW, Best-Buy customer list was recently compromised. So it’s not just facebook that is in hot water. Years ago, it’s Target. Data companies now face their own “recalls”, just like Detroit companies with their faulty airbags.

So, should we stay or should we go. Or do we have any choice living like a two-prong plug in a three-prong society, to paraphrase the late Andy Rooney.

One thing for sure: we miss trusted faces that once were our curators on Morning talk shows, Evening News, and Late Night with so and so. That era has been long gone with no replacement in sight. We are orphans of our own making, with no authoritative figures as guideposts. Current “talking heads” floundered, took to battle-tweet with Parkland survivors ( hey, loser! you can’t even get admitted to Ivy League). Other networks are more apprehensive for fear of finding themselves in similar scandal. One wrong tweet can derail a media career.

Perhaps great men in the past were more discreet or better skilled at partitioning their public vs private lives. Today, amidst all the news and noise, one small slip-up equals a giant step on the road of shame, humiliation without a possibility of parole.