It's an odd feeling, being out of the news loop. My last few days in the UK before I headed home were consumed with trying to find the latest news on the London riots, but by the time I was home I had no real desire to follow up. When I was in Canada, I didn't feel adequately submerged in either Canadian or UK news. When NDP leader Jack Layton died, everyone was talking about his last news conference and how frail he looked. But I hadn't seen it, and indeed hadn't paid much attention to Layton since the election, so I didn't feel as connected to the story as everyone else seemed to be.
Equally, I had no real idea what was going on in the UK. Being on holiday, I was more scanning the front page of the BBC News website before starting my day than really poring over the news as I usually do. I was pretty much off Twitter, a regular source of comments and links that indicate what the big story of the day might be. And that was when I was in the civilised world, not at my grandparents' in rural Quebec, where the lack of a computer let alone an internet connection and the recent closure of the only deppanneur in walking distance meant I spent my days blissfully ignorant of anything that wasn't a canoe or a quad bike.
When I got back to London, I tried to catch up on what was going on. What were the big stories that happened between August 10 and August 30? Okay, things seemed to have progressed in Libya, check. There were rumblings of this Nadine Dorries abortion debate, so I was a bit behind on that one. Hurricane in the US. What else? Hmm, well...nothing earth-shattering then, I guess?
It was a nice reminder that sometimes in the little bubbles we build for ourselves - you know, following a bunch of people on Twitter who all talk about the same things, constantly refreshing news pages, having 24-hour news channels on every minute of the day - stories tend to get a bit over-hyped. Sometimes the big news of the day really isn't that big - we'll spend much of the day talking about it, tweeting about it, blogging about it, battling opinions on it...and then forget about it a few days later.
The abortion debate, for example. For days it's all anyone could write about, until eventually the coverage reached the kind of hysterical fever pitch point where you have to sit down and go, really, are we still talking about this? How many times and in how many fora can the same points be made over and over and over, with one side having absolutely no hope of budging the other? If there had been any real chance that the amendment would be passed, that would have been one thing. There would have been some real purpose in getting all worked up, in making sure that everyone's opinions were heard, in lobbying MPs, etc etc etc. But it was never going to come even close to passing, and everyone knew that. The final vote was 368 to 118.
I'm not saying it's pointless to debate anything that we know isn't going to come to pass, but I think that with the combination of the 24 hour news cycle and the blogosphere, where everyone is competing to make sure everyone else knows what they think and knows that they knew some scrap of information first, stories can just get massively blown out of proportion if there's not much else to talk about. And they can keep running for days. With the amendment not even close to passing, the whole thing will now fade away. The big story about that bill will always be the changes to the NHS that some people see as privatisation, and the yet-to-be-seen results of those changes. People will remember the debate as a footnote, another mad Dorries moment and not much else.
So I think I might go into a self-imposed news exile more often, especially when things seem to be getting out of hand with a story that doesn't really seem to be that big of a deal. If I can limit wanting to scream at my computer/TV/newspaper in exasperation to just once or twice a day, it can only be beneficial to my sanity.
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