Freedom of Choice

Remember those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books that got really popular in the Eighties? For the kids reading them, life could be easily fixed just by flipping back a few pages. Oh, I got eaten by the tiger and the story is finished? I don’t think so, buddy. Do-over! And parents would shake their heads and chuckle bemusedly, because real life wasn’t quite that simple, but kids will be kids and there would be plenty of time for them to learn what real life was like later.
Fast-forward to present day, and things still aren’t quite that simple, but we’re working on it. In the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure days, the news was pretty straightforward. You turned on the television, maybe the radio, and you were told something, along with the rest of the nation, and that was what everyone was told. There were different networks, but the news was essentially the same news.
The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure kids are all grown up now, though, and guess what happened? We’re living in a society in which you get to decide what you want your news to be. As networks like CNN and Fox branched off and started to market their own versions of what was going on in the world, people learned that, hey! I like it when the guy talks to me on this station. Or, hey! I don’t like that guy. I don’t like the way he’s saying what he’s saying. This other guy is saying something different, so I’ll go to him.
In short, news isn’t really news. It’s a packaged program designed to draw in like-minded viewers, and it’s very scientific. The more people, the more advertising dollars. The more advertising dollars, the more money. The more money, the more power. The more power, the better the PLAN TO ACHIEVE WORLD DOMINANCE!
And the beauty of it all? The best part? You don’t have to listen if you don’t want to listen. We are truly living in a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure world.
My news intake is very selective. In the old days, news depressed me, so I would change the channel when it came on. In present day, I feel the same way. But sometimes I use the news in the way a junkie uses a needle – for instant gratification. I want to believe that there are more people like me than there are people unlike me.
I can browse Reddit and feel good about the world and my place in it, and why wouldn’t I want to do that? It’s human nature. Even social media knows what’s up, and has adjusted accordingly. Facebook, for example, has a great feature when somebody’s views are particularly annoying…you can take them out of your news feed. It’s for those people like me who like to avoid conflict, but can’t quite bring themselves to unfriend a person with opposing views.
I use it a lot. And by doing that, I am deciding what news I get in my daily life.
Does it make reality different? Maybe not, but it makes MY reality different.
And I’m not the only one. All over the world, people are choosing what they want to believe, which means choosing what they want to view, and that, in turn, is changing the way the media reports.
Sensationalism sells, as always. People are always looking for the next big story to share on their Facebook wall. But aside from that, birds of a feather flock together. News has very little to do with news nowadays, and everything to do with marketing. Target audiences. Shares. Profit. Cold, hard cash.
Welcome to the new world, folks. Choose your own news adventure. As for myself, I’ll be gleaning my information from Reddit. From my people-like-me news feeds. From the people I like. And pretty much nobody else. You can’t trust them, after all. They’re liars.