Waiting to cross the road yesterday I heard one 50’s-something woman saying to another … “I just feel so sad about her death – I mean, it’s all that they’re talking about, and showing pictures of, on the TV all day, and then all night. It’s just making me so sad”.
As I crossed the road, the wicked in me wanted to turn around and shout to her “you can turn the TV off you know!”. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. She would know that, right? It must have occurred to her. And as I walked I was thinking about how we consume media and how it can have an effect on our thoughts, our feelings and our well-being. Yes – I was one of those people who stayed up all night on September 11. But that was 2001! The way we consume news now is very different 21 years later.
I’ve been away this week and learned about the death of the Queen when I got out of the shower on Friday morning in our hotel room. Paul had read it scrolling the news on his iPad, waiting for the shower. We didn’t turn on the TV in the hotel room because we haven’t consumed free-to-air TV for the past 10 years. Sure, we subscribe to streaming services and watch ABC’s iView and SBS On Demand. We choose what to watch for entertainment, and pull what news we want from the internet. I choose who to follow, like everyone else, on Instagram and YouTube. It’s a consumer market, and I consume, and sometimes I reject/unsubscribe.
We were travelling home that day – the one that Australians will remember as the day they woke up to find that our Queen had died. I was at the airport for 2 hours and on a plane for an hour, plenty of time to catch up on social media that I’d missed in a busy week. I quickly realised that scrolling through the news, Instagram and Facebook only pointed to one piece of news. There were only photos of one person, couple or family – the royal family. It was too much. So I closed myself off to socials, choosing instead to read a book. It was a choice. The same choice as the woman on my walk. The same choice as all the republicans who would do away with our links to the royal family, and the monarchists who have been so distressed and saddened by the news. You can turn it off.
We all have the choice to consume what is fed to us or to reject it. Sure, I can end up down a rabbit hole of information on the internet – clicking links and finding myself, an hour later, not able to remember where I started from. But it is for enjoyment – never to bring me sadness. On the other hand, I have read amazing books and watched movies, plays and ballets that will elicit a huge range of emotions. Writers have the ability to take us to the highs and the lows, but the difference is that these feed our souls and our imaginations. Art adds to our experience of life.
So next time you find yourself being bombarded with bad news, bad TV, bad writing, bad content, and it is affecting you, just turn it off. Life is too short for the world to dictate to you what you should consume because you have the right to choose.
