NEWSBEE

Newsbee is my latest learning hive.  It was called "Selling" but the idea that I can get better at a practice by reading about it is one flaw in the original learning objective, but today as a violent act in Barcelona played out, I also asked myself where learning to sell is in my priorities, when the actions that groups take depends on what they are sold on, and the news coming out of Barcelona showed the negative side of a group trying to sell violence to its constituency.

While events may be a unique to the news cycle, the subject of news has a pattern and the reaction to these news cycles also follows a pattern and then when we throw in social custom into this mix, the way we receive news also has a pattern to it.  To break that pattern it is important to know how news effects us personally and whether these effects are solely our  choice or whether external agencies have some form of design attached to that effect.

It turns out that I am not the only one who has questioned these patterns, and my questioning pertains to my relationship with news.  After today I realized that watching news the way I have watched it to date is a relationship with someone selling me something and not a relationship with intelligence.  Even with huge breaking stories like the Barcelona story earlier this afternoon is curated in a certain way, and it is a way not to far removed from how Vox question it in their video "This is your brain on terrorism" :

There is a middle ground between journalists talking media in an academic setting for a couple of hours and the BREAKING NEWS that keeps breaking when news media become vultures trying to get ahead of story that is generating mega-ratings.  It is a middle ground that I have not so far found, because even though I may talk about the conditioned effects of marketing and news media, it is also clear to me that, just unlike selling, documenting our own news watching can itself provide us with insights that we will be blind to, because our attention is saturated in moments that ignite our mirror neurons and amygdala. 

It is when news is touching us at our emotional center, that we are also at points that may get defined as "historic moments".  It is no different to there being an solar eclipse event due where I live on Monday at 1pm - watching the news is like watching that solar eclipse - even though I can rationalize it as the moon simply casting a shadow in front of the sun, no amount of rationalization will stop us from venturing outside at that time to experience a brief moment of darkness - because it feels historic and we have heard that it is a once in 90 year event.  We may even directly look at the sun during this event even if we are told that it is not safe to do so - and that is what we are like with shocking news - we are drawn to it like moths to a flame - or at least that zap machine which produces an intoxicating blue light for mosquitoes.  If I can master how to handle such news, I may find new ways of processing information and handling insight.  I may end up improving the very quality of my own attention - and that is a good newsbee to be.