We are used to news that makes incremental changes to our reality. A new president, a 5-1 victory for the national team, inventions and wars, they all nudge reality in small way that can only prove their significance in due time. It has to do with the rate of change. If the rate is fast enough we are likely to notice, whether the change is significant to the underlying process or not.
Slow changes are hard to notice or respond to
The world adopted private central banking in a slow process that took place during the first half of the twentyieth century. Production and consumption in the western world became highly dependent on fossil fuels in the same time period (not by coincidence). These where fundamental changes to our lives we never really noticed. The difference is that in our daily change reveals itself as a repetition of similar events. Centralization and privatization of banking was a political process, without detailed interest all meetings and votes look the same. The introduction of every car, truck, diesel generator where steps in the direction of fossil fuel capture. Everyone first bought a gas powered frridge, then an electric one. The first laundromat may have been a sensation, the next billion wheren’t.
A record broken every day loses its news value
This is what makes climate change hard to report on. The changes are similar, they are repetitive. Species are in danger, they go extinct. It’s hotter than last year, every year. A drought, a flood, again, strange strong winter weather, dying fish, again and agian. This type of information doesn’t register. We want to learn about changes that have some immediate impact on our lives. Every time a new hundred year storm occurs it’s a hundred year storm, again. What can anyone do about it?
Another profound factor is generational renewal. Each generation accepts the reality they learn about the first time as a benchmark. Once there wheren’t any nuclear reactors, and many people protested. Now there are and new ones are nothing new. The pollution they cause f.i. in Fukushima has outraged those that understood the risk, but the new generation won’t know any better than that the pacific has heightened radioactivity. Without a significant change to the direct reality of people, they are not sensitive enough to respond.
Every child outgrowing the protection of its parents has to learn that not every man is a father, not every women a mother to them. So if the fossil fuel markteer / evangelist sufficiently reminds them of their parents they can dictate reality to them. That’s the difference between child and adult : enough private experiences to distrust the word of strangers. Religion, hiking a ride on this parental authority cause the most insane distortions of views of reality in the believers, some of which are designed to keep them captured by the specific thought system in question.
Just a good rule : Talk to everyone at least once
The media live of the capture the achieve of their audience. Fear is a great way to immobilize the audience. The active outgoing people don’t see a relation between TV news and their reality. The people that are passive enough to hang in front of a TV will be tought to keep watching it. It is not in the interest of the TV business to teach much usefull information, the medium is a vehicle for advertisement. It leverages peer pressure, like with the World Cup. You have to watch or not know what happened like everyone else. The root of this communal sacrifice of time and attention to the soccer experience is that these men represent the assumed soccer elite of our country. We come from our country, we have to watch! The subsequent struggle displayed demands respect, and victory is celebrated as personal. But the reason we do this is strictly commercial. The World cup is a marketplace where your attention is sold to the highest bidder (and people play soccer).