Real life is “unimaginable”

"I just can't believe that there's people in the world that are capable of this type of hate," Ashley Markham, 26, told ABC's "Good Morning America" today. "This is just unimaginable." via Daughter of Slain Fla. Couple: 'This Is Unimaginable,'

Since when is murder “shocking” or “unimaginable”? Since TV that’s when. People get their news and their entertainment from the same medium it is inevitable that they get the two mixed up sometimes. It’s unimaginable because they think that what they see on the news happening to other people every day doesn’t really exist. They never in a million years thought that the crime that they see every night on the evening news could come out of the picture-box and affect them.

It’s like going to the doctor and getting a cancer diagnosis. You need to know now that something at some point has to kill you. You just learned the truth from a guy on the Internet, but you know what? You probably still don’t believe it. You think that somehow you are going to live forever.

All of these people think that if you live far enough from the real world, out in their gated suburbs free from minorities and poverty that somehow real life will never touch them. They get immersed in their lives of quiet comfort and forget that there is a world of people who want more than what they have so they get shocked when anything bad happens. Sequestering yourself from real life makes everything “shocking”.

Why newspapers so very badly need to die

Ok, so these guys went to journalism school and learned all the tricks of the trade. They do not like having all their hard word and expertise devalued. I understand that. Professional web-developers tend to look down on people who never went to school operating websites, chefs tend to look down on home-cooks as barely-competent amateurs. I get that. It goes with being being trained in anything, you resent all the people who have not paid their dues. It still does not mean that your product is worth my money.

The truth is that of all the professions listed above, journalists are the least necessary. Their “professional product” least worth paying for.

When was the last time a journalist did anything useful? Seriously. What have you read in a newspaper or seen on TV that changed how you went about doing anything? The front page of the New York Times today has stories about Judge Sotomayor, the CIA-Cheney conspiracy to hide things from congress, and Obama’s trip to Africa. Most people in America have made their minds up about Cheney and Sotomayor without having to read the Times, and their opinions have nothing to do with anything these people say or do. Most of the content of the major news outlets is worthless. It is reportage for the sake of reporting. You have all these journalists and this equipment so you have to put something out or it would all be wasted. There is a lot of effort put into making it seem important, meaningful, but it’s not. In a way bloggers have highlighted this. With hastily written, ungrammatical, inconsistently spell-checked work cobbled together in basements, they can put together a product that sells almost as well.

I did not know Michael Jackson, and aside from liking one or two of his songs back when I was still young, I have no sentimental connection to the man. If his passing and the subsequent issues were of any importance to me I would bookmark TMZ.com, not purchase a magazine or newspaper. Every issue that a newspaper might cover has dedicated bloggers who are obsessed with that one thing, people who would sell their first-born to find out something new and to share it with a network of similarly obsessed individuals. The blogs might be repetitive and hard to read, but you will get more information in five minutes than you would from a long, padded-out NYT article written by some disinterested preppie.

The big question is why this is even being debated. There was once a time when the fastest you could get your news was in the next days’ paper, where the stories would be fact-checked and edited and those writers would get another 24 hours to follow up. You got your stuff slowly because there was no more efficient means of dissemination than tree-flesh. Now there are better ways, or one better way, something faster and more efficient. All the stuff that we didn’t have to know is available along with the very few bits of info that it might be useful to have.