Your Swine Flu Fun Fact # 27: If during the Swine Flu epidemic you begin to have prophetic dreams of a) a kind old African American woman sitting on a porch in Nebraska and b) a man with long hair and piercing black eyes in Las Vegas I would highly recommend making the trip to Nebraska. Mainly because it means you will have the opportunity to make out with Molly Ringwald. Oh, and if you see Kareem Abdul-Jabar with a cardboard sign proclaiming the end of the world I would take that as a sign to start packing.
In reality, as of right now I would view the whole Swine Flu thing with an air of caution. One of the problems with our new environment of constant information is that we now hear the same news stories multiple times a day and as a result we lose our sense of scale. Right now we have a flu outbreak that has proven fatal in Mexico and non-fatal elsewhere. While it seems to spread easily it doesn’t appear to have a high mortality rate. Basically, if it spread easily and had a high mortality rate the numbers from Mexico should be a lot higher. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t all be aware of the situation and taking the proper steps to avoid the flu. Just that the world is not going to end at this precise moment.
But given our media fueled lives that is entirely the perception that we are given. It is a top story on all of the websites. News broadcasts feature it as their lead story and the 24 hour news networks talk about it 72 times a day. Your twitter feed is filled with people discussing it (whereas my twitter feed is nonexistent because no matter what anyone says, twitter is idiotic.) Compare this to the Swine Flu fears of the 1970’s. Then all you would do is read about it in the morning paper and get an update by Walter Cronkite in the evening. The screaming heads on television really up the paranoia to an unmistakable degree.
At some point there is such a thing as too much information. Except in this case there isn’t enough information. We are just being fed the same minimal data over and over again in various forms until we stress out to in an inordinate degree. Networks understand that when they flash the Breaking News graphic that it will get your attention even if it is about a story that is of no interest to anyone. Any news regarding Anna Nicole Smith, now or at any time in the past, could never be considered breaking news but it was certainly sold as such. It is what makes us a bit of a slave to our machines. We know that if we fall out of the information loop that we will feel ostracized from the rest of society but we also know that most of the information in the information loop is completely gibberish.
So just keep all of this in mind as you watch the news this week. It is quite possible that there might be a time when worrying is the proper course of action. Right now it isn’t.
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