Tag: news

This might be my last post specifically relating to the Cornovirus outbreak because it’s time I started following my own advice.

Since my Digital Declutter post in May last year I haven’t blogged. I have been trying very hard to cut my internet use and media consumption back. I have been successful for weeks at a time and I have felt a lot better about everything. I was still doing this when the virus started leaving China and making its way to Europe so I was slow to pick up on what was happening. Even as Italy prepared to lock its doors I was under the mistaken impression that it wasn’t really going to impact me.

When it finally did hit me I fell back on my old patterns of using the internet too much, listening to news radio and, basically, trying to inhale as much information about the situation as I could. Unsurprisingly, the weeks that I have been doing so have been very stressful. And the question I find myself asking now is; was I really worse off when I didn’t understand the full implications of what was happening?

Perhaps, but I’m not sure it’s as straightforward as that. Maybe it would be better to ask whether I am better off checking the news every fifteen minutes than I would be checking it once or twice a day? I’m pretty sure the answer is no.

Most of the news I’ve read and watched about it isn’t actionable information. Which means that the only outlet I have for it is panic which doesn’t do me or the other people around me any good. And it is quickly driving me back into the old unfortunate habits that I’d hoped were behind me.

My solution then is to check the news twice a day; once mid-morning and once when I have finished work for the day. That should give me everything I need to know about what’s happening and it should reduce my levels of stress. What it means for this blog is that I am going to try to write about other things, things that I was thinking about before this all started and will still be thinking about long after it is all over.

Stay safe out there.

I have read a lot of post-apocalyptic books and watched a lot of movies. I’m sure you have as well. That’s probably one of the reasons why I’m finding the news so distressing at the moment; because it all looks so familiar. But if that was the only issue then I think we would be okay and we would see a lot more people behaving like reasonable adults. Unfortunately, we also have a lot of experience of modern news reporting to go on.

We all saw what the media did during the Brexit campaign and during the most recent election. Until recently we could see it happening in the Democratic Primary in America. We know that the media isn’t presenting us with an unbiased factual report of what is going on. They are using the same attention grabbing techniques that they have always used, the scare tactics and rhetoric. Unfortunately this seems to be creating two courses of action:

1. People refusing to believe what they are being told and carrying on life as normal.
2. People believing that the world is going to end and panic buying toilet paper and hand sanitiser.

Neither is a good response, but I can’t blame anyone for either. This is what the media does now and no one trusts it. Either we assume they are over-inflating the crisis, or that they are deflating it. There’s no real way of knowing which one of these it is or if, in this rarest of moments, they have all decided to start being professional journalists and are reporting things accurately.

There’s no short term answer to this and I’m not here to tell anyone what to do. My advice would be to listen to the doctors and nurses who are working on the front line and have first-hand experience of what is going on. And, while it’s probably a good idea to play it safe, can I suggest that if we run out of toilet paper in the shops we have probably already run out of something much more important.