Distractions

Opening my home page today, I was stricken by all the silly distractions surrounding bits of real news and helpful information.

There were meaningless quizzes, games, come-ons meant only to entice you to click on an advertiser's page, superficial questions about celebrities - asked in a way that conveyed the sense that these people actually matter in our lives, massive commercial messages, self-promotion, links to websites that blare unwanted music or bizarre sounds upon opening, and so much more nonsense that has nothing to do with a real life - that suck up time without any payoff.

Honest to goodness - I do not care if "Brangelina" are together or apart or square dancing.

It made me think of the T S Eliot poem "Wasteland," where he writes of pouring sand down a rat hole - a useless activity that has no real outcome, but still feels like we're doing "something."

Then there are the folks who take their time to respond to stories - leaveing "comments" that are frequently an extremely poor reflection on the American educational system and proof positive that common sense is not so common.

I usually ignore wastes-of-time on websites, but designers are getting more clever in pulling my attention to matters that really do not matter.

Even the modern website's "hard news" section is never without some sort of celebrity gossip or misleading headline geared to entice us to click to a page promising us information, but which again is filled with fluff and pure unapologetic junk.

I couldn't help but think of the book , "Entertaining Ourselves to Death." In essence, it says that while we're busy finding more and more ways to entertain ourselves, the folks in charge of our political futures, money and survival information surgically remove us from having - or for that matter even wanting - control over those things that are crucial to being a well informed electorate - consumer.

There's a vast difference between information and knowledge; the former being useless or useful, the latter being actually true and empowering.

Useless data without perspective only lays out "facts" which are not really facts at all. Just because someone says something does not make it a fact or true. It's only a "he said/she said" report without ever letting us know what the truth is. That is typical political reporting. Dems say x, Reps say y, without any real clue as to the veracity of either statement.

I'm not sure it will help in the long run, but I changed my home page.