How do we consume media? Credit: Positive News/Freepik.
“Do we have to watch the knife and gun report again?” my wife and I would lament to each other every night early in our marriage. We eventually decided to stop watching the evening news, feeling relentlessly inundated with shocking images and sickening stories of greed, hatred, trauma and callous acts of inhumanity.
It’s not that natural disasters don’t exist or that there isn’t plenty of hard-hearted behaviour in this world. And a newscast might indeed include something positive. But it would typically be fleeting and overshadowed by darker and more fear-mongering stories. These stories were sure to grab a hold of your amygdala, the fear centre of the brain, and not easily let go.
