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Is text messaging the devil’s work? An evil plot, sent to earth by a villain intent on destroying us?

In all likelihood it isn’t – but that’s not what the pundits would like you to believe.

Over the years text messaging has been blamed for everything that’s wrong with the world, from declining grammar skills to antisocial behaviour.  It’s played a part in identity theft scams and has been known to throw a wrench into public careers (just ask former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick - a one-time “rising star” whose political career ended in 2008 when he became embroiled in a text messaging scandal). 

“Textual harrassment” is a new phenomenon that’s been gaining traction in the news.  It was most recently featured in the Washington Post in a story that draws a correlation between it and violence against women, citing the murder of 22 year-old  Yeardley Love, whose death was precipitated by threatenting messages on her cell phone.

“Textual harrassement”, with it’s headline-friendly moniker, is examined ad nauseum by the media and has been known to get the tongues of  technophobes wagging.  Yet despite all the posturing and debate that’s been going on in the news,  it’s a pretty safe bet that the technologies that make texting possible aren’t going anywhere.

As long as common sense is practised text messaging is harmless – but that doesn’t make for front page news.  Truth be told, it’s far easier to blame society’s problems (like declining grammar/social skills and violence against women) on emerging technologies rather than on the society itself.  If our communities are truly in decline then we’re the ones that need to be examined, not our electronics. 

So text away my friends.  You’re perfectly safe in doing so – as long as you aren’t doing it behind the wheel of a car, of course.

On October 15, 2009 the media bombarded us with images of a curious-looking weather balloon drifting through the air. According to the headlines it had become untethered at a private home in Colorado and floated upwards of 7,000 feet before landing a few hours later. Inside the balloon, purportedly, was 6 year-old Falcon Heene.

What initially sparked fear and panic was later revealed to be a giant hoax. Falcon had never been anywhere near the weather balloon – he’d been hiding in a box in the attic the entire time, as instructed by his clearly-deranged father. It turns out that the Heenes are nothing more than a family of fame-mongerers, the masterminds behind a sick publicity stunt aimed at drawing attention to their upcoming reality TV show.

It’s been a week since the Balloon Boy incident and major news networks continue to prattle on about it. Online, people have debated the “newsworthiness” of the story, calling for an end to its coverage.

Yet it continues to make headlines.

Most, if not all, of us have extended this story’s fifteen minutes of fame in one way or another – including those of us who have lamented its coverage. News networks haven’t conspired against us to report solely on the ridiculous and the absurd – instead, they report what sells, and right now Balloon Boy is selling.

Competition is fierce among major news networks. Not only are they forced to contend with one another, but they must also find a way to stay relevant in the face of online social networking, the blogosphere and user-generated content websites like YouTube. The need to report a story first has become more important than anything else – more important than relevancy, more important than fact-checking, and certainly more important than journalistic integrity and we, as a public, seem to be eating it up.

We may collectively despise characters like John and Kate Gosselin, Octomom and the Heenes, but we can’t seem to turn away.

If you’re able to ignore the fame-hungry train wrecks that trapeze across our televisions on a daily basis, I applaud you.

I, obviously, am not that highly evolved.

The nuts in the health food industry are an innovative bunch. Their business – which is almost completely based on fear - changes its marketing tactics every few years and it continues to generate billions of dollars in profits.

No wonder they always look so smug.

Organic foods have been around since the 1990s but they didn’t become a booming business until a few years ago. In 2008 organics generated over $20 billion dollars in sales and they show no sign of slowing down, as the industry is projected to increase by 18 per cent this year.

The Health Nuts say that going organic is very important. Not only will it improve our state of well-being but it will also save our lives.

According to one organic website:

“Organic foods are spared the application of potentially harmful long-lasting insecticides, herbicides, fungicides and fertilizers. Many EPA-approved pesticides were registered long before extensive research linked these chemicals to cancer and other diseases. Currently the EPA considers 60% of all herbicides, 90% of all fungicides and 30% of all insecticides to be potentially cancer-causing.”

I decided to research organics. I looked up some of the chemicals commonly found in our foods and in our household products and I read about the effects they can have on the human body.

It was terrifying.

I embarked on an organic mission. I bought an organic body wash ($6.99 for a 250 ml bottle vs. $6.99 for a 500 ml bottle of chemically-enhanced wash), organic shampoo and conditioner (it smells awful – or natural, as the bottle puts it – and it leaves my hair feeling greasy) and I replaced my makeup foundation with one that’s chemical-free (it has the consistency of concrete and it’s about two shades lighter than my natural skin).

A half pint of organic blueberries, a few carrots and litre of milk ate up nearly a third of my weekly grocery budget.

If I keep this up I’ll never be able to afford meat again but I don’t think I want to buy meat anymore. The Health Nuts say that the cheap stuff – which is all I can afford – is full of nasty hormones and chemicals.

“Good” meat costs double.

As I sit at home and munch on my carrots I imagine what a chemical-free me would look like.

Would I be healthier, happier and beautiful – like the people in the advertisements?

Or would going organic have absolutely no physical effect on me and only serve to drain me of my already-limited income?

When I consider fact that food safety is heavily regulated in North America and that today’s food – chemicals, recalls and all – is still far safer than the food our great-grandparents ate, I’d place my money on the latter.

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I was once afflicted with a bad case of writer’s block. It lasted for eighteen months.

It’s not that I didn’t have ideas. I had plenty. They’d hit me unexpectedly – thwack – but as soon as I’d try to put them on paper they’d simply disappear.

I screamed.

I cried.

I curled up into a ball and hid under my bed covers.

But I still couldn’t write.

Humans are a judgy race. I judge; you judge. Half of the time we won’t say what we’re thinking but we all pass judgment. We can’t help it; we’ve evolved that way.

You are judged.

I am judged.

Me – I’m small and young-looking. I smile a lot. I have a childish voice; when I answer my phone telemarketers routinely ask if they can speak to my parents. I have a hard time standing up for myself.

These attributes practically scream “meek, stupid, uninformed and gullible.”     I’m not being self-deprecating or looking for sympathy – I’m simply calling a spade a spade. I am not any of these things and I’m proud of who I am  – but that doesn’t change the way others tend to judge me.

Writing has always been the best way to voice my opinions and defend myself. When I write nobody regards me as if I am a sack of nails. I am the queen of scathing, angry letters and eviscerating reviews. Not being able to write was more than an inconvenience. I felt like I had been robbed of my voice. It was as if I was suffering from a prolonged case of laryngitis and it was absolutely horrible.

During that time I was in contact with another, more successful, writer.

“A true writer will continue to write even when there’s nothing to write about,” he told me. “Write grocery lists if you have to. Just keep writing. If you don’t – or ‘can’t’, as you like to say – you shouldn’t call yourself a writer.”

He didn’t help matters.

When I reached month seventeen of my drought I set out on a mission to discover what had stumped my abilities.

There is an interesting article online. It’s called Information Overload and it’s  by William Van Winkle. He says that we are bombarded with too much information.

This, according to Van Winkle, can cause depression, anxiety and disease.

Did you know that the typical business manager is said to read one million words per week?

Or that a Sunday edition of the New York Times carries more information than the average 19th-century citizen accessed in his entire life?

It’s true, says Van Winkle.

And what is the quality of the information we’re processing? Most of it is useless.

George Carlin is my idol. He is incomparable and brilliant. He has a monologue about choice in modern society. I am paraphrasing, but here is the gist of what he says:

“They speak about freedom of choice (in capitalist society). What we really have is limited choice. (In America) we have two political parties, essentially.

Big media companies? Five, maybe six, max.

Oil companies? Down to three, I think.

All of the important things are reduced in choice … we only have one or two big newspapers in the city and they’re owned by the same people.

But jelly beans and ice cream? Thirty-two flavours. Your only real freedom of choice in America is smoking or non, paper or plastic, aisle or window. All of your important choices are already laid out for you.”

I over think things.

In the summer Wal-Mart has an aisle dedicated to sunscreen. I once wasted an hour in there and I came out empty handed.

Now imagine all of us, collectively caught up making these inane decisions. We’re all stuck in the ice-cream parlours trying to decide between Vanilla Bean and French Vanilla. We waste one minute here and a minute there and all of the sudden it’s time for bed.  Where did the day go? We ask.

We’re exhausted.

We drift off to sleep, thinking about the twenty-seven emails that will be waiting for us in the morning and we don’t have time to think about the war and the murdered children and our rising health care costs.

When we engage useless information we become a shell of the person we are supposed to be.

When I worry about useless things I cannot write.

When I tune out the frivolous things that surround me my creativity comes in waves.

It’s getting harder and harder to differentiate “real” news stories from Onion news stories.

I know every news outlet presents the odd bit of fluff but THIS …

Well. 

 This is a whole new level of low, even for CNN standards:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbw1UluwVhg]

Maybe we should stop panicking about the swine flu and divert our attention to the fact that CNN is analyzing President’s Obama’s “swagga”.

Sigh.

Stupidity seems to have reached epidemic proportions. 

If you ask me, that’s a MUCH bigger problem than a little H1N1.

[source: The Huffington Post]