terça-feira, outubro 28, 2008

Quando a crise nos entra pela casa dentro...

Estamos todos a ser bombardeados com informação? Será que conseguimos assimilar tudo o que recebemos?

Um artigo do New York Times intitulado Overfeeding on information chama a atenção para esta onda de fome de notícias e pode ser um bom começo para se reflectir sobre esta matéria.

Aqui fica uma amostra do texto:

«YANA COLLINS LEHMAN, a film production accountant who lives in Brooklyn, knew something was amiss when her 5-year-old son, Beckett, started to announce to no one in particular, “I’m John McCain, and I approved this statement.”
Ms. Collins Lehman, 36, thought: “Oh my God, I’m watching too much news.”
But it is hard not to, she said, with the financial markets in meltdown, and that crisis increasingly intertwined with a frenzied presidential campaign entering the homestretch. This is why her own news diet has spiked to where it feels as if it’s taking over her life. And maybe her son’s, too.

(...)

ERIC KLINENBERG, a sociology professor at New York University, said people are unusually transfixed by news of the day because the economic crisis in particular seems to reach into every corner of their lives. Usually, he added, people can compartmentalize their lives into different spheres of activity, such as work, family and leisure. But now, “those spheres are collapsing into each other.”

And the news is not just consequential, but whipsaw-volatile. Financial markets swing hundreds of points within an hour; poll numbers shift. This means that news these days has an unbelievably short shelf life, news addicts said. If you haven’t checked the headlines in the last half-hour, the world may already have changed. (...)»

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