My Monday Rant: The shortlived, unfulfilling joy from the negativity and controversy of mass media... I don't get why we pursue it anyway.

Monday, 16th September 2024... another one like DJ Khaled!

I try as much as I possibly can to stay away from "gossip" news on the Internet. Hopefully these rants don't fall in that category. ?? In "formal media", whatever that group of media is called, I predominantly read about sports, particularly soccer and Formula 1... and anything and everything on LinkedIn or Medium.

With every article, especially, intented professional ones, there is always some background to the story, or at least the main characters of the story. I've observed, with great disapproval (not that it means anything, anyway), that most journalists always go for something controversial or some history that is bad from the characters' past. What this means is that, for every headline about a certain person/character, more than 60% of it is about the same one thing that is controversial or bad in some sense from the past. But why though? Why the propensity towards negativity or controversy? I really do not know and the more I think about it, the less I actually get it; especially because none of it brings any lasting feelings of joy or fulfillment, at least not to the consumers of such media. Unfortunately, such negativity and/or controversy is what garners much of the attention that the writers seek. So why is it that attractive?

Mass media, the term comes to me now. The problem I have with mass media is the tendency to dehumanise their characters - writers and consumers alike. When you do that, it's like you have a licence to just be as mean as you possibly can, because you're just aiming shots at a character, not a human being; that is why I'm off social media. (https://shorturl.at/Ri0EY). It is easy to sit back and criticise such media, but if we look close enough, we all have it in us to do and act in the same way; we just don't usually do it on mass scale. Without making any excuses for journalists who have to keep their websites continuously updated, they also work on assumption that they might be reaching a new reader with every article so they somehow feel the need to refer them to their "main article", which happens to be that negative/controversial one.

Back to us as individuals, what is our excuse? Ever realised how, whenever someone mentions another person's name in a conversation, we have a tendency of ALWAYS bringing up something "not nice" about them from the past? Somehow, we chuckle over some embarrassing moment in the past, how they used to look like in Primary School, how bad they were in sports, how they fell over their head once... you get the picture I hope, just a laugh at the expense of such a person. I wasn't even aware of how naturally this comes to most of us till I made a conscious decision against it, and then I started noticing it more and more in most people. I can't say I've totally overcome it myself, but there are defiantly a lot more situations now that I don't do it; sometimes even if I have to stop myself in the tracks and just think about it. It's disturbing. And again, I can't figure out why that is the case and I'm stuck with a case of a chicken and an egg; does the mass media's propensity towards negativity and controversy influence us as individuals in that way or do/did we influence the mass media being that individuals are responsible for the mass media?

We may never know for sure. Pointing fingers to the mass media might just be a way of avoiding responsibility for our own actions.

As I sign off, if there's anything at all, that you ever take from these rants, let it be this... let's watch it as individuals, it might just be the start of the change needed in the larger scheme of things.

Até proxima semana!