News silence

“No news week”.

I was just reading a feature in the May – July 2015 issue of Womankind, where they asked a number of women to get through a week with no news.

I was pondering how this – going news or media free – seems to be a topic of conversation/discussion that comes up every so often in the media I read these days. I was theorising that this must be our reaction to how saturated we all are with information and news these days – a periodic, mass “stop the world, I want to get off!” There’s no getting away from things, it seems.

“Look, I don’t take a paper. I mean, a daily paper. And I don’t watch television news. I watch television but not the news. It upsets me. I mean, if it’s not atrocities in Albania or kids burnt to death in a fire, it’s baby seals getting clubbed to death. So I don’t look at it anymore.”

That excerpt was from the novel Harm Done by Ruth Rendell, published in 1999. The speaker was being questioned by Inspector Wexford, who was incredulous that she had been unaware about a missing 16 year-old girl, who had been missing for days. So even then, just as the Internet was taking off, there were people who switched off. It must have been easier then. Just don’t read the paper and control your TV and radio.

These days, I don’t know if I could stay completely ignorant of things that are going on, even if I want to. I’ve tried going “news free”, which for me means no social media. This is very limiting, though, because it also means I am quite cut off from many family members and most of my friends. 

I have been having an extended weekend and enjoying the bliss of no appointments and no plans for a couple of days. I’ve been lying in bed reading novels (Ruth Rendell) and listening to music and not paying much attention to anything except whatever was going on in my home. I’ve made very little effort to stay in touch with current affairs, but even so I haven’t been completely isolated. Every time I’ve picked up a device and had a look, inevitably I would learn something. “The federal government’s done what now?!” 

Even via Instagram, which you would think is just for pictures, I learn things. For instance, this past Monday, Instagram was where I first learned that the creator of the Palatino font, Herman Zapf, had died.

I wonder though, where this compulsion to keep up, to know what’s going on, where it comes from. The stuff we’re learning about, knowing, is it stuff we really need to know?