24 hour news and Interneting...
Generally, I think the 24 hours news cycle, at least of the commercial variety, is a bad thing. It makes it way too easy for stories to be given more play and significance than they deserve in a desperate desire to fill air time and keep viewers watching.
But then there are times when it truly does serve a purpose, such as with Katrina five years ago and the Egypt situation over the past few days, which truly seemed (at least from an American's viewpoint) to crop out of both nowhere and everywhere (one acquaintance kept asking what caused it, what was the one inciting incident, but the fact is I don't think there was one -- it seems the Egyptians were looking at Tunisia and just decided, "Hey, why not us? Thirty years of this is enough...").
On a very base, impersonal scale, I think events like this are awesome sources of information for writers. We're getting to watch these massive events in real-time, and are no longer left to our own imaginations when it comes to describing the destruction of a major U.S. city or the downfall of a modern dictatorship. We can see what tactics would be used, how people would truly react... It's really quite amazing. What would have taken hours of research and studying before... we're actually witnessing right now.
On a non-writing scale, and the next few days may prove me wrong, but I'm wondering if Facebook and Twitter, for all their random superficiality of letting us know what our friends are eating and who is sleeping with who, have done more than any other medium to minimize the place of armed revolutions in our society. I'm sure there will still be plenty of wars, but I wonder if people who feel oppressed won't be willing to take more of a stand if they know all they have to do is come out in the streets en masse and let the world see it rather than raise an army. (Which leads to the mental image of George Washington telling these modern revolutionaries, "Back in my day...")
The fact is (and I say this without any actual basis in research -- it's my blog and I can do what I want), an uprising like the one in Egypt, if it took place 100 years ago, or maybe even as recently as twenty, could have been crushed with very little harm done to those in power. But today, with the ever-present media that is considered frivolous 90% of the time, it may succeed in toppling the government.
So now, in regard to liberty, maybe access to the world wide web is more important than the right to bear arms.
But then there are times when it truly does serve a purpose, such as with Katrina five years ago and the Egypt situation over the past few days, which truly seemed (at least from an American's viewpoint) to crop out of both nowhere and everywhere (one acquaintance kept asking what caused it, what was the one inciting incident, but the fact is I don't think there was one -- it seems the Egyptians were looking at Tunisia and just decided, "Hey, why not us? Thirty years of this is enough...").
On a very base, impersonal scale, I think events like this are awesome sources of information for writers. We're getting to watch these massive events in real-time, and are no longer left to our own imaginations when it comes to describing the destruction of a major U.S. city or the downfall of a modern dictatorship. We can see what tactics would be used, how people would truly react... It's really quite amazing. What would have taken hours of research and studying before... we're actually witnessing right now.
On a non-writing scale, and the next few days may prove me wrong, but I'm wondering if Facebook and Twitter, for all their random superficiality of letting us know what our friends are eating and who is sleeping with who, have done more than any other medium to minimize the place of armed revolutions in our society. I'm sure there will still be plenty of wars, but I wonder if people who feel oppressed won't be willing to take more of a stand if they know all they have to do is come out in the streets en masse and let the world see it rather than raise an army. (Which leads to the mental image of George Washington telling these modern revolutionaries, "Back in my day...")
The fact is (and I say this without any actual basis in research -- it's my blog and I can do what I want), an uprising like the one in Egypt, if it took place 100 years ago, or maybe even as recently as twenty, could have been crushed with very little harm done to those in power. But today, with the ever-present media that is considered frivolous 90% of the time, it may succeed in toppling the government.
So now, in regard to liberty, maybe access to the world wide web is more important than the right to bear arms.