Meaning?
I was just looking through a series of photos of couples. It started with one couple, then showed each of their two sons with their wives, and finally showed the two sons of one of these last couples. Apparently the other pair had no kids. All of the photos showed people in old age. Did the last two brothers never marry? Who knows.
It got me thinking though. The last of those photos looks like it was taken in the early 1900s. The only value in the clothes that they are wearing is that it helps us to estimate the period that they were alive. What did these people think? What was important to them? They lived lives and we know nothing about them.
Should we? At the times that they were alive people knew them, they were important, their opinions mattered. They got angry about things, and wrote to papers, fought people, or argued with their partners about things that seemed important at the time.
Are these same issues important to us now? Probably not. In these peoples day, they were really invested in the problems of their time. They may have been convinced that the issues that they cared about would change the world. But did they? Probably not. We see things in the world that seem really important to us now. Things worth arguing with people about, protesting. But I think that there are very few things that we battle about now that will matter to anyone in a hundred years.
I would love to think that people in the future will look back on me and say “Oh yeah, that was the guy that …”. But probably, the most that I can expect is that maybe someone will come across a photo of me and wonder about what I cared about?
What is important when you’re alive? Each of these people affected their family and their community, but when they were gone they were briefly a memory, and then nothing.
Media (social and otherwise)
We are so connected now that we can know anything. We have the reach to see things happening all over the world. But for us to see it, someone has to publish it.
Traditional media only publishes what they think will make them money. They try to out-do one another with the exotic and the bizarre. They are not interested in anything that is not bizarre and unusual.
We gain our perceptions of what is normal and true from what we see every day. So if the news every night tells us that there is a terrible economic downturn, and it’s going to get worse, of course we start to spend less. So the economy will downturn, and the media will be proved right! And we’ll keep spending less until the media is distracted by something else and forgets about the economy. And then the economy will recover. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that the recovery from the global economic downturn in 2009 coincided with the swine flu pandemic. All of a sudden the news you saw every night stopped any mention of the economy, and instead was full of swine flu. People started spending again and all was well!
What we see every day is what we come to accept as normal. And the media is showing us ‘bizarro’ earth. If you watch traditional media day after day, you’d have to come to believe that the worlds population is made up of terrorists, murderers, rapists and politicians. But in reality, by far the majority of the worlds population are good, normal people. By showing us the bizarre, the media is moving our perception of what is normal off centre towards the bizarro zone.
While a lot of people criticise social media, I think that it will be our salvation. It contains the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, but that is life, and it is in balance. In traditional media we see the bizarre. In social media we see reality. People living their lives, and sharing their experiences. We get to see drunken rants, and bigotted comments, but we also get to see peoples favourite recipes, and what they did on the weekend, and how they’re enjoying their lives! It doesn’t have to be bizarre to be seen! This I think is far more valuable to us than another hour of death, destruction and politics delivered by the TV news.
By sharing in peoples lives we get to learn that the majority of people are good, normal people. Don’t let your view of the world be distorted by the media freak-show.
Do all the things! 
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