As I discuss the daily news with various people I know, it seems as if people are neglecting the significance of realizing that people on television are as human as ourselves more often than before, as if the divide between fact and fiction is becoming harder to imagine for ourselves. As how when we watch the news, understanding that those affected on television could be, or similar to someone we know, or that the world is more dynamic than simply our local communities, and that we should play a more active role in our society if we should want anything to change.

An example of this, and most of us are guilty of it, is that for example, if on the news there is a missing child, and the parents are on television praying for the safe return of their child, we loose interest as a result of our assumption that the parents are guilty of murder. Or that if a person is found to be missing after last reported to be hiking on a mountain, that we assume immediately that the chances are the that person will wind up dead. Why is that? In the past, several times before there have been cases that match our assumptions. Such inductive reasoning is natural. However, the amount of information that exists in the news today simply feeds this inductive nature of ours.

With the growing presence of 24hr news channels, as well as the building influence blogs, pod-casts and news sites play in our daily lives, and that of television and print news outlets, American society has become less likely to take in the reality behind the new stories, and desensitize ourselves in order to continue functioning normally while we continue to accept more information every year. Its this information overload that plays a major part in why we’re finding it difficult to see the difference between the reality of a news story and that of fiction, such as CSI or Law and Order.

It would seem that only when major events occur, such as Hurricane Katrina, 911, the Indian Ocean tsunami etc. are the only sort of events that take us away from thinking that what we see on television is merely something that happened within our television, as if it were any other television show. To think that our responsibility to separate reality from fiction when something happens on our television requires something as large in scale as a hurricane or terrorist attack on US territory brings me to think that there may be no means of having it any other way, that we’re stuck like this for some time to come.