What is news?

Where is Nigeria? Where is Thailand? What is the dominant religious group of Nigeria or Thailand? Who is the current prime minister of India? Who is the president of Cuba? How do you feel about the possible power shift in Russia?

Do you have any clue as to what I am talking about?

I just finished watching the 11 o’clock news feed from New York City…I then flipped to Headline news on CNN’s 24-hour news channel, then, to top it off, I switched over to the local Utica, NY, news replay at midnight. In my 90 minutes of channel surfing I was treated to exactly 8 minutes of news about the terrorist attacks in India, the cabinet choices of our president elect, and the state of our economy based on Black Friday sales. Beyond that I learned about how we spend billions of dollars listening for aliens from outer space, how two different celebrity couples could not make it work after six months and a year respectively (and how each couple had multiple kids, all of whom were over 2 years old…go figure). I learned about a local “chicken riggie” competition, how to help my child fall asleep without medication and which 4 food products may be damaging my health (though more research is needed). I learned the increasing American consumption of sushi is endangering the world tuna population. I was updated on the 5 local (NYC) professional sports teams, 12 area college football teams, 8 local college basketball teams and 20 high school teams. Oh, and I was treated to 28 minutes of commercials and 11 minutes of weather (all local) in that 90 minutes. Furthermore, the “news” that was presented was not feel-good, upbeat news. It was a lot of sensationalism. A lot of pandering. Some fear mongering was thrown in. It was mostly about ratings and money and cults of personalities.

I then listened to the BBC World Service and :

Ÿ --I learned that 400 people died in a riot in Jos, Nigeria due to an election between Christian and Islamic politicians.

Ÿ --I learned that the ruling party in Thailand was under siege from the nation’s own army and that the two largest airports in Bangkok were shutdown in a protracted siege by one of the rebel groups.

Ÿ --I learned that Bangkok has 11 million people and the two shuttered airports serve not only Thailand but act as huge regional hubs. The larger airport is the second busiest in all of Asia and the 18^th busiest in the world.

Ÿ --I learned that the ex-president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, has been making moves to extend his power and the power of his United Russia party. That since 2003 he has worked to make almost all other political parties irrelevant and has allowed only three parties a major place in the Duma (the legislature)…one party is the communist party, another is the Liberal Democrat party (not Liberal or Democratic, that party is ultranationalistic and is working for the reunification of the USSR, removal of all “non-traditional” or fanatic religious sects (i.e. Catholic or Protestant), and the return of all agricultural land to the government) and the last party is the Rodina Party (an Ultra-ultranationalistic party that makes the Liberal Democrats look like Mother Teresa’s friends).

I learned all of this in the first 6 ½ minutes of the news. Before any commercials, weather or sports. Before any warnings about what unknown microbes may be making me sterile while I sleep. Before any mention of what celebrity drank themselves into a stupor and flashed the world.

Does the violence in Jos really have anything to do with my life here in Central New York? Does the political unrest in Thailand impact my life as a moderate conservative here in America? Maybe. Maybe not.

If you read books such as Friedman’s The World is Flat you may come to believe that we really do live in an interconnected, co-dependent/dependent, fully integrated and global community. How then can 99% of the U.S.’s population be so out of touch with happenings in the world? How do we expect to compete in this connected world if we can’t even have a semi-intelligent discussion on the events of our immediate lifetime? How do we make ourselves relevant in this global economy if we can’t even find our trading partners on a map? How can we demand more global responsibility by our own government if we cannot argue which political systems in the world we should move to change and which we should move to emulate?

[This rant has nothing to do with our lack of historical knowledge or of the context of these events but in a way, you can’t separate the present from the past. You can’t teach WWII without first looking at the events of the 1920’s and 1930’s in Germany that led to the war mongering. In order to understand those events you really need to teach WWI and the peace agreements at the War’s end. But to understand WWI and its resulting treaties you must have some appreciation for the multiple treaties that were in place before the Great War began. I could go on and on with this stream of cause and effect ad infinitum, ad nauseum but needless to say, nothing that happens in the world today happens in a vacuum…every event is the result of a complex series of domino events that preceded it. So, what is this diversion about? Just to point out that beyond our need for a greater knowledge of the present we also need a greater understanding of history.]

In an age where information proliferates faster than ever in history and is more accessible than ever before, how can our generation be so under-informed? Why does the People.com website have more daily hits than any single news website other than CNN.com? By some estimates (UCAL Berkeley’s Information Systems and Management Program does an annual study of information available) there has been a doubling of available information just in the past 3 years and it will double again in about 2 years. There is about 5-6 exabytes of information out there. That is 6,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information (to put that into perspective: if you digitized the 17 million books in the Library of Congress it would equal about 136 terabytes of information…you would then need to repeat this 37,000 times to equal just 5 exabytes!). That information is available in digitized or published or recorded form and is available via the Internet and the library systems of the world to more people than ever before. Through programs like XO’s One Laptop:One Child program, even kids in developing nations have the opportunity to access an immense amount of information. What a paradox: more information is more easily available in more forms than ever before and we may know a lesser percentage of it than at any prior point in history. I can know in minutes what happens around the world…it I want to. Or I can chose to read about the latest pop star’s 20 minute incarceration. Hmmmmm.

Now, to sum: our generation and our children’s generation will suffer in the world economy and in the world’s political hierarchy if we don’t become better citizens of the world. Our laziness...our egocentrism…our ignorance will come to cost us all a great deal. What can we do? We can become better students. We can choose to read a little more international news. We can choose to talk with our kids about events in the world…point out places in the world, keep a globe around, post a map somewhere in the house, get involved in their civics homework. We could listen to a little more NPR or BBC World News and a little less Howard Stern. We can engage our colleagues in discussions and take it as a challenge to be informed. We can choose to

Long rant, I know. Any thoughts?