No Ability To Discriminate

Did you read about British Queen Elizabeth II having a stomach virus? I don't know how you could avoid not reading or hearing about it. I suspect if a nuclear bomb exploded in London it would receive about equal attention to the Queen's tummy ache.  So much ado about the insignificant today is annoying.  It seems to me that people today have no ability to discriminate between real news that affects their lives and the unimportant or trivial. In this age the important is often lost to the inconsequential. I suspect it is because of the information overload that makes it difficult for many to tell the difference between what they should know and what is merely amusement. What do you think?

A look at news papers of the day, of the TV schedule, of street talk and there seems to be much less substance than in earlier eras. People tend to find more importance to what their favorite reality TV person does in a given day than to what goes on in the school in which their child attends. It's harder to have meaningful conversations with others unless one becomes a storehouse of the insignificant people, places and things of the day. Too a person tends to ignore what is important because, "I don't have time for that."

What worries me is that kids are the worst offenders of the "I don't care about the important because the trivial is more interesting to me", mentality. This makes sense, given kids are the biggest users of the endless electronic communications that puts everything disseminated on an equal footing. It explains, for example, why a local newspaper's headline about a Hollywood celebrity meltdown is front page news and news of their child's school being closed is buried in back section of the paper.

I thin that as information that is truly important for society to know and discuss has become less discernible it might be a good time for schools to specifically teach news discrimination skills. If not we may have a future society that is too informed about the Snookie or Kardashian crowd and too little about people who really matter and impact our lives.