Articles

The Wheat and the Chaff

By Kerry Ruetenik

Recently, a close friend of mine lamented that since the events of September 11th 2001, a day has not passed where he has not talked, worried, or argued about politics. My life has changed, he complained; I feel overwhelmed by all that's in the news. As a young person just out of school, his career plans have evolved with the shifting of political affairs in the U.S. On the one hand, he has this dream of traveling throughout the country talking to people about the news, about the stories we read and the ones we do not. He wants to raise awareness, to have conversations and arguments with people in states radically different from California, perhaps persuading them to agree with him. Short of that ambitious agenda, he wants to go abroad and teach English, to get out of the political cauldron that his life has become, and start fresh in a foreign culture, to try and change the world somewhere else.

My friend's feelings cannot be that unfamiliar to us all. Concerns over current events have entered the home and the workplace in ways unimagined before. Ordinarily Americans once detached from the political realm became gravely concerned about world events commencing with the disastrous day of September 11th ; the conflicts in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq have only inflated this effect. Moreover, the advent of palm pilots, blackberries, and cell phones with internet capacity has enabled us to access the news at any time of day. We read news from the standard sources and we search voraciously for atypical sources (remarkably, The Associated Press reported on April 1st, 2002 that "Al-Jazeera," the name of the Arab news station in Qatar, was the one of the week's top-requested search criteria on the World Wide Web). As was the case during the Vietnam War, many television talk shows regularly field debates on the role of propaganda during times of war.

It has been said that one of the major paradoxes of our time is that though our minds are increasingly saturated with information, we are farther and farther from true knowledge. Though the meaning of knowledge or wisdom can certainly be debated, many of us can agree on the level of information saturation in our lives. In my own daily routine, I listen to the morning news on the radio during my drive to work, or pick up a newspaper in the train station. At the office, I inevitably check a few headlines online, and after a long day I travel home and watch a little TV (usually news) or surf the web (usually news websites). I have noticed that I watch more news on the days when something particularly dramatic is happening abroad, perhaps in the war in Iraq. Reading news makes me feel connected, like I might be that little bit more prepared for whatever disaster is coming next. Reading news makes me scared, which makes me feel like reading more news so I can stop being scared. News addiction has not yet been identified as a medical illness, but when it is, I believe the doctor will prescribe the purple pill to me first.

My good friend who laments the changes that have come into his life, who wants to travel the country talking about news and media and "what's really happening" is looking for his own way to confront media saturation. He wants to fly headlong into the cacophony that surrounds him. Or, he wants to escape to a place like China, which will deal him a whole new set of challenges, distract him from questions of whether the U.S. is responsible for good or evil (to borrow a dichotomy set forth by our president). Anything less than his bus ride or going to China would be giving in--bowing to the pressures to consume and be very scared, because then he will consume some more. Media saturation is not possible without media consumption. Corporate media would not succeed without the market basis, the need of a concerned population to feel informed, included, and prepared for coming disasters. My friend is tired of reading and worrying, so the alternatives he sees are to fight or flee.

My grandfather is another person whose life has changed since September 11th, 2002. A retired aeronautical engineer whose professional years were spent designing airplanes that could fly through the blast of a bomb. Patriotic to the core, he believed in the necessity of averting the spread of communism, and he made his contributions duly. The political events of the past few years have coincided with my grandfather's introduction to email and the World Wide Web. He, like so many of us, has become a news addict, and he regularly emails twenty-plus relatives his choice of the week's most politically compelling stories. He adds commentary to every story and, in the dawn of his eighty-first year, he has refined his opinions about Boston politicians, the environment, the plight of seniors and gambling, and, of course, the war in Iraq. For me, these emails from my grandfather are a new kind of media saturation--one given to me through the filter of my grandfather's consciousness. I tend to feel there might be a lesson learned from this experience.

After all, any news article delivered to the public--be it through the newspaper, the radio, the TV, or the web--is a news article chosen above so many potential others. The news stories that tell us the ways of the world are stories that have won their Darwinian struggle toward propagation--have somehow earned the right to thrive. While no standardized paradigm exists to determine which articles reach the public and which do not, it behooves us to remember that people, bare humans with all their fallibilities, are doing the choosing. They perceive through their cultural lens what is fit for publication, then they choose, and their choice inevitably reveals biases and interests.

One of World Savvy's many objectives is to raise youth's skills in media literacy. How does media literacy differ from regular literacy? While there is not simple answer to such a question, World Savvy does seek to guide young people to burrow beneath initial bits of information, to understand the difference between fiction and truth. In one part of World Savvy's curriculum, students read articles and underline all that is fact and all that is opinion. They discuss the statements that seem to inhabit the gray area in between. In another exercise, they look at photographs without text and try and understand how many different messages one picture might substantiate.

Media literacy, it would seem, connotes an act of choice-making. With this form of awareness, one can decide whether to accept information or to refuse it--to walk away from a story or a claim like one walks past the racks of celebrity news at the supermarket. This skill is undoubtedly empowering and it surely provides the best method for confronting the onslaught of often-terrifying headlines.

Like my friend, I sometimes think that I have limited choices since the events of September 11. When two airplanes can destroy New York's tallest skyscrapers, when I hear about duct tape and anthrax, I cannot sit passively and defer from the milieu in hopes that a better day will come. These times have an urgency about them, an urgency that calls me to attention. When the fight or flight mode kicks in, I find recourse in a professional life that has allowed me to be involved in advocacy and education. For me, the battle is against ignorance, dependency, and blind consumption--my own and that of members of communities around my own. As a global citizen, a member of a politically powerful culture, I feel a compelling responsibility to read, to debate, and to hone my opinions on global issues. While this process can lead to information (over)saturation, the alternatives are unfathomable.

Kerry Ruetenik is an intern with World Savvy. She holds an undergraduate degree in English from UC Berkeley and has traveled widely. She currently resides in Alameda, California.