Let’s face it, it is impossible to sort your way through all this information. However, if you rely on someone else to do so and this give you a list of what to read, you are filtering your information through their prejudices. Not a good thing.
Dennis Prager, radio talk show host and philosopher, believes that you can become overwhelmed. And when you do, your ability to understand any information is threatened. So he takes a day off each week. For one day a week (in his case Saturday) he talks to no one, turns off the computer and TV, and simply relaxes and lets the information in his brain percolate. He says the chaff simply goes away, and the wheat remains. The brain works in mysterious ways.
He is in a high information business and it’s important to him to get as much input as possible so he can carry on conversations on his talk show. However, he is not afraid to admit to a caller when he doesn’t know anything about the topic the caller brings. He then is in a perfect position to ask good questions and learn from his listeners.
It’s an editor’s job to sift through all the chaff and publish only the wheat. The problem is that you have the same issue. Back in the ‘day’ editors were hard bitten realists that required at least three sources to confirm a story. Technology has changed all that. Stories move so quickly that there is simply no time to edit. A person catches a story on their cell phone and it can be flashed around the world in seconds. No one thinks to look at the pictures or question what happened. (An editor’s job).
Here at PT we give it our best shot. We have an aggregator that publishes around 10 to 15 stories about parking each day. When you look at the story, you see the headline and the first couple of sentences. You can then decide what you want to read. It’s called parknews.biz.
Astrid and I worry daily over what stories we are including in PT and hopefully select those that interest you. If we don’t, let us know. Our goal is to keep the clutter minimized.
I read somewhere that only about 5% of the people that read on line social media (facebook, X, Linkedin, etc) actually comment on what is there. I’m not exactly sure what that means, except that perhaps the information we receive on line is so vacuous, that it doesn’t intrigue us enough to comment about it. Or it could be that you are so overwhelmed with information that you simply don’t care enough comment.
I would commend Dennis Prager’s approach to you. Take some time away from the media, all of it, and let your mind relax and do its sifting. Who knows? Maybe you too can separate wheat and chaff automatically.
JVH
