HUMANITY IS BACK

Humanity is back!! (or at least on the way back)

So I would suggest that for the next week or so you don’t spend any more time reading depressing articles about Trump on Twitter or in the papers. “It just makes me sad and angry” I am hearing a lot.

What is now clear is that the population are able to rally if need be to make their opinions heard. Together. The women’s marches all around the world on Saturday said everything we needed to know about how most of us are feeling and it was good to know that we could all do something collectively about it.

This form of activism and the politics we are facing is going to change the way we see the world. It will inevitably make our youth more active and strident and surely that is a good thing. It feels a little like humanity is back and set to be a new “trend” in our age of digital overload and I’m sure we are all looking forward to getting back to basics and actually talking to each other about issues that matter. Hopefully we are going to see this throughout the world, whether it is dealing with neighbours, our working life or our travel demands for a more personal experience.

All this “fake news” is “great news” for journalists. Aside from the fact that most people surround themselves with those who tend to agree with them thus in a constant state of choosing to believe what they wanted, the issues with false news is huge. It is causing us to be more careful about what we choose to read and indeed what we choose to believe. So I don’t think it will be long before we start to see an increase in demand in newspapers again and in credible journalism that is designed to offer an objective view of the world – perhaps not in paper form so much, but certainly online. I personally love a good paper format, but then I’m old. You don’t see many millennials doing that – well you don’t in my house anyway and that is not through want of trying – I always leave little bits of torn out newspaper for my various offspring to read, depending on the subject matter. I don’t think as yet it has prompted them to ever buy a newspaper.

How do we teach our young things to read again – beyond the 7 seconds of concentration they have these days? How do we select what we read? This is a serious issue and I see there are lots of apps appearing that collate all the news we want to read, but there is a long way to go…

For now, I’m choosing to buy (and read) The Economist and the Weekend FT. That’s a start.