TMI

I've jokingly told people that since I've been married, I've adopted an Amish lifestyle. Basically what that means for me is that I (a former borderline TV addict) really don't watch TV anymore. Otherwise, I'm still as electricity- dependent as I've ever been, I'm not at all close to trading in my car for a horse and buggy, and I'm not setting aside huge blocks of time to can strawberry jam. There are several factors that have contributed to my personal TV fast, but probably the biggest one has been just having another adult around in the evening to talk to, which I've found so much more entertaining than American Idol or Lost. No one is more surprised at this turn of events than I am.

A frequent TV watcher when I was growing up, I dreaded the rare occasions when the network would interrupt programming for an “important announcement.” This didn't happen often, but when it did, I knew that something huge had happened: someone important had died, some disaster had struck, there was a major development of some sort in Washington. And while I resented the intrusion into my TV enjoyment, I could tolerate it, because this was something that the grown-ups definitely needed to know. I can remember watching some of those significant events: the first moon landing (I can even remember that it interrupted Brady Bunch), President Nixon's resignation, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger--truly memorable breaking stories.

The past few days, though, I've been on a brief spring break getaway with my family, and I've been exposed to more TV than usual. In the three days that I was gone and in the brief interludes when I was in a place where a TV was on, there were three breaking stories. I began to wonder if there truly is breaking news anymore when nearly every story is labeled “breaking news.” Monday evening 's breaking story was about a stolen Cessna that had been chased down until it landed on a dirt road somewhere in Missouri. From the attention the incident was receiving at the time, viewers might have thought this was some sort of act of terrorism--certainly something with international implications. Could it have been that a person simply stole a Cessna? During breakfast on Tuesday morning, reporters went on and on with the breaking story that the president had made an unscheduled stop in Baghdad. Newsworthy, probably. But since the stop was unscheduled, the media didn't have any details, like why the president was there and with whom he would be meeting, and no video footage of anything, really. And yet this did not stop CNN from going on for a very long time . . . about nothing. And Wednesday morning, the third breaking story we heard in three days was about Somali pirates that had hijacked an American merchant ship. Certainly newsworthy, but certainly not on the same level of significance as some of the past breaking stories, such as a president's resignation, an assassination attempt that left a president seriously injured, or a jet flying into the Twin Towers.

It seems to happen all the time in current culture. Our outrageous appetites for information require constant feeding, and the quest to know drives the information “feeders” to grab for anything to satiate our appetites. And in our informationaholic state, we no longer distinguish between fruits and vegetables and whole grain breads and candy bars and potato chips. We want information “food,” and it doesn't matter whether it is healthy or not. Perhaps the clearest case of this is Twitter, where, in one instance, I can read the tweets of a major publishing executive and find out the minute details of his life--who he's had dinner with and how many miles he's just run in the gym--along with the books and articles he'd recommend that serious businesspeople read. And the result is that the four miles he has run this morning become just as significant as the next tweet, where he recommends some book about marketing strategy. No matter how interesting a person is, no matter how savvy, it's hard to believe that anyone can have something truly significant to share with the world every few hours.

Which leads me to the news media. When every news story becomes a "breaking story," how do we know what truly is important, life-changing, and history effecting? And eventually, when every event becomes significant, then nothing is significant anymore because nothing stands out. Nothing makes us leave the “junk food” of the Brady Bunch to sit up and take notice of a situation that truly requires our attention. And we're just as satisfied to read that Mr. CEO had dinner with Mike and Carol Tuesday night as to learn that our new president is adopting radical administrative policies that will change the way medical people may exercise choice in their jobs according to their consciences. What a reporter is calling a breaking story becomes his or her attempt to fill twenty-four hours of air space seven days a week.

Wanting stuff—and lots of it—has brought the world to a serious financial crisis. What will wanting information—and lots of it—end up costing us? What has it cost us already? Quality no longer becomes important in the rush to deliver and receive quantity. Too much information--like too much of anything--is not good for consumers or for producers. Consumers become numb to the product, and the producer simply keeps churning out more of the same in a vicious cyle of meaninglessness. And we find ourselves reading that Mr. CEO ran only three miles this morning because he overate last night when he had dinner with Lucy and Steve. And, unfortunately, we're satisfied with that.