The stress of billions

The exponential expansion of media coverage and communications led to the exciting buzzword (or rather buzz-term) that you don't hear much of now that the Internet has lost its novelty: the global community. This has been touted as an advancement for the human race generally, allowing people to know what's going on in a foreign country (often before the people in that county do) and letting two people on opposite sides of the earth to speak in real time, among other things.

But how much better off are we?

Don't be misled, this is not going to be a technophobic rant about the evils of this and that. I use the internet and email every single day and would be utterly lost without them.

However, there appears to be a dark side to instant information. As recently as 100 years ago, people were living in the dark (comparatively speaking, anyway). Only local news could be considered timely; national news was limited by what could be transmitted via telegraph and as for international news – well, how fast did ships travel?

Now, when there is a terrorist attack in a country we have never been to, or a natural disaster that affects a country we have never even heard of, we get it all – exhaustive reports, streams of images (constantly updated, if you have a news channel) and reporters adding a verbal commentary, most of it telling viewers how they should feel. In this way, the world's problems become the individual's problems. And the worst part is that this inherent interest in negative news is exploited for financial gain. Bad news sells, all the media companies know it, and the unstoppable rise of reality TV shows proves that when enough isn't enough, they'll manufacture their own human drama.

We really have become a global community – it's a small town community where everyone minds everybody else's business. The media encourages us to have an opinion about everything, even if secretly, deep down below our "educated" exterior, we really couldn't give a shit.