Knowledge Puffs Up

Paul wrote, "Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up" (1 Cor 8:1). I'm pretty sure that this is not what he meant, but there is certainly a potential parallel in the media.

The news media is not new. We've always had means of disseminating information about what's going on around us. In earlier times it was, obviously, not nearly as efficient. In today's technological world, it is huge. Almost instantaneous. If not instantaneous, often nearly instantaneous, fed by eyewitnesses with smartphone cameras. If something happens, it seems, we'll know about it. Or ... will we?

The human body is a marvelous thing. (Bear with me here; I'm not rambling.) We have sensors that detect everything from a bug on our leg to a breeze in the face. Eyes, ears, smells, tastes, all sorts of inputs feed into our brains and our brains take it all in and give us a host of conclusions regarding the data. The problem is all our extremely sensitive sensors are working all the time providing more information than our brains can actually handle. So built into our brains is a component called the thalamus. This functions as a gate keeper, determining which sensory signals are relayed to the conscious mind. The best way you can see this is in smells. You know how that works. You get a strong smell and wonder what it is. However, after a short time, it's gone. Leave the room and come back, and the smell is back. The thalamus says, "This is a new smell and you need to evaluate it." After a little while, it concludes, "It is no longer an urgent factor." Leave and come back, and the smell registers again as an urgent factor.

The news is like that. We think that we're learning everything that happens via the news media. We know, however, that this not true. "Everything that happens" is way too big to be encompassed. So we don't get everything. We get the "urgent factor." We get the outliers, the new things. According to this story, the reason we use the term "news" is that in the 14th century the term was used as a plural for "new." It was intended to express the things that were new. And, if you think about it, that's basically what "news" is. We don't hear everything; we only hear the outstanding, the unusual, the news. That is, not the normal; it's the unusual. Consider an example. In 2016 there were 37,806 vehicular deaths. Wow, that's a lot. Well, sort of. In terms of 100 million vehicle miles traveled, we're looking at 1.19. Did you see that? On average, in order to have one person die on the road, you have to drive 100,000,000 miles. That's a long way between traffic deaths. In terms of 100 thousand people, that was 11.59 people killed. That is, in a group of 200,000 people, 199,977 did not die on the road. You understand that this is a death rate of 0.011% among people or 0.00000012% in vehicle miles. Let me put that another way. In 2016 323,370,000 Americans traveled 3,174,000,000,000 miles. Of those, better than 99% did so without dying. That is huge. Did we hear it in the news? Well, no, of course not. It's not news because it's not new, it's not abnormal, it's not pressing information. Our "thalamus" media filtered that out for us and only mentioned the accidents. In fact, mostly only the big ones. None of that penny ante stuff. Because that's not news.

It's what we would expect. This isn't a complaint or pointing fingers. This isn't a problem. What is a problem is when we don't understand that the news is only giving us an extremely small portion of what is. We hear the outstanding, the unusual, the rare, the shocking, the horrible, maybe even the wonderful. We do not hear the normal. "Normative" means "that which defines 'normal'." The news is not normative. But we think it is. This is why we have parents being arrested for child endangerment because they let their preteen walk two blocks to the park without parental supervision. It's not because it's dangerous to do so. It's because we don't get it. We have some knowledge, but it's puffed up. It's misguided, misapplied, missing the mark. We think "Kids go missing all the time" because we heard the news about a kidnapping or two and fear ours will, too, forgetting that the kidnapping was news, not normal. We hear that a black kid was shot by a police officer and buy the chant that black people are harassed all the time by cops, forgetting that the tragedy was news, not normal.

We live in a world flooded with news. News from far and near, news from friends and family, TV news, Internet news, social media, anything you can imagine. It has been said that a lie travels around the world before the truth can get its boots on. One study says that false rumors actually do go faster and farther than the truth. In all of this, we forget that news is "new" plural and not "normal." So why do we let the sensational, the unusual, the deviations and anomalies dictate our lives? Why do we make so many major decisions on so many minor events? Why do we assume the unusual is the normal? It's a lie from the father of lies. Don't go there. That is puffed up knowledge. And it makes a mess when we think we're simply aligning ourselves with truth.