The world we live in

In the scenario of a devastating earthquake in Nepal costing the lives of thousands, with people frantically searching for their loved ones via social media, and following the never-ending loss of so many lives in the Mediterranean sea as migrants try to make the crossing, it seems almost frivolous to read about a Hollywood celebrity who, at the age of 65, has announced to the world that he is transgender.

I am not making light of Bruce Jenner’s decision, but merely pointing out that both types of stories are often given an inordinate equal amount of media and public attention.

But this is the world we live in: the deluge of stories and articles via the information highway and our newsfeed, come our way oddly and sometimes bizarrely juxtaposed with one other. Hollywood gossip makes the headlines with the same frequency and with the same prominence as horrifying world events.

Sometimes we forget that (until fairly recently) this is not always the way it has been. We used to get our news at the end of the day in a sombre evening newscast, after a newsroom led by an experienced editor would have carefully selected and written the stories, leading with the most important and rounding up with news items which had more of a curiosity value.

Now, it is often Twitter which dictates the scale of importance, as an item which captures the rather ghoulish attention of the public starts trending and the story explodes.

All this was brought into sharp perspective after reading a book called “Forgotten Girl”, based on a true story of a 31-year-old British woman who wakes up one morning in 2008, but believes she is back in 1992, when she was only 15 years old. Her amnesia, which wipes out 16 years of her life, is caused by a series of traumatic events, but the most riveting parts of the book are how she has to struggle to cope with the constant shocks of how everyday life has changed. It is through her descriptions of the daily technology we take for granted that you stop and think about just how accelerated the pace of change has been. It doesn’t seem that 1992 was that long ago, does it? But in terms of how the world has changed, it might as well be 1950.

She literally freaks out every time she sees her family and friends nonchalantly using things like iPhones and iPads (whatever happened to buttons? she asks herself in confused bewilderment) and ATMs, where money just pops out, are a thing of mesmerized wonder. The concept of Reality TV leaves her stunned: “I was shocked to hear how people with no talent became rich and famous overnight by actually doing nothing other than allowing millions of people to watch them.” Put in those terms, it really underlines how our constant exposure to this kind of television has almost lulled our senses into accepting it as a legitimate means of valid entertainment.

It is when she discovers the Internet and the magic of Google however, that she really becomes overwhelmed. Unwisely, she spends a whole day catching up on what has happened since the time John Major was Prime Minister and is bombarded by the long list of tragic events caused by terrorism, from 9/11 to the bombings in London, to the war launched by Bush in search for the Weapons of Mass Destruction. The world she has woken up to is a scary one with dire warnings of Global Warming and countries doomed to poverty and hunger. Obviously, reading bad news like that in condensed form, all at one go, would do anyone’s head in.

Reading this book against the backdrop of what is happening in the world today is significant. On the one hand we are riveted in horror before tragedy, but on the other hand, information overload means we often end up trivializing it because our attention span has become so short. We register the awful news at one level, but then our over-stimulated, over-loaded brains just say, “OK, next!” especially if it’s a story about which we feel utterly helpless and hopeless.

Unfortunately, we are also living at a time when it pays to be outrageous and even ghastly towards other human beings. How else can someone like Katie Hopkins become notorious (and rich) for saying appalling things about migrants crossing the Mediterranean, comparing them to “cockroaches”? An article in The Telegraph put it better than I ever could:

 “This is simply the reality of choosing to live our lives on social media rather than in the real world; if we measure our success entirely in clicks then there will be people who will stop at nothing to get them. Being controversial is no longer to be avoided for fear of offending future employers; in fact, it’s become a whole profession in itself.”