I am old enough to remember when we essentially had three channels to watch on television. Those channels were 3-6-10 … or better known as NBC, ABC and CBS. Times have certainly changed from when I was a child.
Flash-forward to today’s world and you have countless channels depending on how you watch television.
If you’re not a big TV viewer, you can still gets loads of information from your phone, laptop or desktop, not to mention other mobile devices.
That said, take for example the recent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
The news that the 45el President had been wounded at a Pennsylvania campaign rally moved like a firestorm across both the major TV networks and numerous social platforms. Whether you turned your television set on or you saw the news on your cell phone, odds are you heard about the news rather quickly.
While I was not alive at the time, I have seen numerous clips of the day back in November of 1963 when JFK was assassinated during a visit to Dallas. Legendary newsman Walter Conkrite breaking into CBS afternoon programming to deliver the somber news to the nation is something most of us have viewed at one point or another.
Keep in mind the coverage of Kennedy’s murder was long before the Internet, cell phones and so on. If you wanted breaking news, television and radio were pretty much the only ways to go about it.
Is the 24/7 news cycle good or bad?
Having been in the journalism profession now for some 35 years, I’d like to say I’ve seen a lot of things.
From being on the ground post-Hurricane Katrina, covering a Super Bowl, attending the Inauguration of George H.W. Bush and more, I have been fortunate to be witness to a number of historical events.
With that in mind, I do often wonder whether the 24/7 news cycle is a blessing or a curse.
On the one hand, you have access to news at your fingertips. Even if you’re not a news junkie, you want to be abreast of the key things taking place around you and far away. You don’t want to be so out of the loop that you’re in a haze when a co-worker, family member or friend mentions an event on the news and you are in essence clueless about it.
On the flip side of the coin, you can become inundated with news to the point where it can prove time-consuming to your daily schedule. For some people, they become distracted in the workplace, classroom, life at home and more by being so preoccupied with their phones, the computer and so on.
Healthy balance of being informed and not married to the world of information
So, what is the key to finding a healthy balance?
While you want to be informed, you do not want it to consume you.
My model for getting the news consists of checking my phone or computer several times a day to see what is taking place. If there is big news breaking, it is not uncommon for a friend or family member to text me and ask if I had heard about it.
I will say one of the worst habits I’ve got is waking up in the middle of the night and getting on my phone. That is to check the news, sports scores, my text messages and so on. It can take a bit of time to fall back to sleep. While I try not to do it, there is seemingly always that urge to roll over when I awake and see what is going on in the world.
If there are specific topics of interest to you, you can always get alerts on your phone or computer for such things. When it comes to your television, recording shows of interest always works.
In the event your phone or other devices are keeping you from a good night of sleep, it may well be time to put them far enough away where you can’t reach them when trying to sleep.
With the days of only channels 3-6-10 far in the rearview mirror, you can best bet that our world will become even more inundated with news 24/7.
So, is your world too full of information 24/7 and you want to scale it back some?
More importantly, how are you sleeping at night?
If you’re like me, you might be checking your phone one too many times while under the covers.
