Most weeks I feel like writing an editorial.
This was not one of them.
As much of an exciting challenge it is to form ideas and arguments to then throw them out into the void, there are some weeks when . . .
it’s overwhelming. Even without an international health crisis that’s sure to be followed up by the worst financial downturns witnessed in a century, there was still plenty to talk about.
The slow burn of the ongoing scandal involving the WE charity, which I touched on a couple weeks ago, would be enough to fill an editorial every week for the foreseeable future. With the two Ken Doll brothers at the centre of the imbroglio and their pal the prime minister testifying before parliament this week, I will save my breath for a more opportune moment (always good to keep one in the chamber).
In Nova Scotia, there have been calls to launch a public inquiry into the shooting massacre that claimed 22 lives earlier this year. The provincial and federal governments opted instead for a toothless “review” of the case, which has angered many of the victims’ families.
In addition, there’s no shortage of municipal issues to wade into, or banal musings about the summer weather to spew onto these pages.
Consuming news media these days is so nauseating that I often want to throw my computer in a lake.
How did we go from scanning a newspaper once or several times a week to shaping our worldview through a never ending torrent of drivel from the internet?
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of problems with weekly or less frequent print publications (I could fill a book with them), let alone radio and TV, but the power of an infinite scroll of posts and status updates is that it’s insidious. It plays off of the weaknesses of the human mind.
Every like, share or comment, whether it’s generated by your best friend, an algorithm or a Macedonian teenager, triggers a little hit of dopamine. Reading print on a page requires effort and concentration and feels much less rewarding.
As much as these social media (read: data mining) companies try to pass their platforms off as some kind of progress, they’re all crude imitations of human interaction. It’s all fabricated, curated and doctored to the point of absurdity. If we gave a thousand monkeys typewriters and pumped them full of amphetamines, they wouldn’t in a million years be able to replicate such an incoherent jumble of nonsense.
With a gushing geyser of (dis)information getting pumped into everyone’s eyeballs for several hours a day, why bother writing a column in print? It’s a bit like watering the lawn during a monsoon.
Distraction is a far more effective tool for the powerful than outright censorship.
The business model of the previously dominant form of news presentation, network television, was a never ending series of spectacles smash cut in sequence and aired with little context. The internet “news” business is a continuation of that insanity, with several million more channels and none of the structure. Shysters from across the globe competing for just a half second of your attention, trying to sell everything from diet plans to Albertan separatism.
It’s enough to wear anyone down and quite frankly, it’s a threat to a free and open society.
Or maybe I just need to log off.
Caleb Nickerson
