McGill Tribune

Three hundred and sixty-five more days have been filed away into the dusty archives of history. Starting with the devastating Haiti earthquake in January and ending with a breathtaking total lunar eclipse in December, the year 2010 was filled with events.

Yet, a few years from now, most of us may need several minutes to plumb even a few of these events from the depths of our memories. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and list three to five major events that took place in 2007.

The paradox of time has been this: our years are getting more and more full of what the media deems “events,” but we are remembering fewer of them over time. In essence, we are getting robbed of experiences that do matter, and memories that we do not even care for are forcefully recording themselves into our minds.

Partly responsible for this scam, as always, is the media. In the past, the value of news used to be measured in what was called the “information-action ratio.” An event was newsworthy if it could translate into effective action in peoples’ lives. A tornado warning would be very newsworthy, because it could lead to precautionary measures taken by those alarmed. Today, we still have useful tornado warnings. But we also have truckloads of junk that have no actionable value in our lives making it to the 6 p.m. news shows. And we remember it very well.

When you mix the serious with the trivial and coat everything with the same glaze of sensationalism, you get indifference. Celebrity breakups and natural disasters start competing for our limited attention and emotions, and surprisingly, it is actually a contest. For example, most people can’t tell you how many lives were claimed by the monsoon that hit Pakistan earlier this July. Yet they would not hesitate to tell you the name of the promiscuous golfer who drove his public image off a cliff. Thanks to the media’s ability to perfect human stimulation and to optimally exploit our brain’s memory centres without our knowledge or permission, we now remember a man who continues to live with shame and forgot 1,600 people who died with honour.

However, as much as I love accusing the media of heinous crimes against humanity in general and democracy in particular, we, the consumers, are the real defendants. We are the ones who are consistently selling out experiences for more useless information. We are the ones who have confused efficiency for mere reductionism, expecting to receive our news in the form of quick sound bites and congratulating ourselves for being well-informed. We are the ones failing to keep up with the serious problems within our own homes and communities, preferring instead to keep up with the Kardashians.

Year after year passes us by, and our minds continue to fill up with nonsense wrapped in ignorance wrapped in oblivion. Without realizing it, many of us have become participants in the dishonourable project of undermining the important and lionizing the trivial. In my opinion, I don’t think we can afford to keep going down this road.

Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” If this is remotely accurate, then we need to change things around.

At the beginning of every year, millions of individuals adopt fresh resolutions. Most of these resolutions end in failure, usually because they are too poorly defined, too broadly stretched, and too spuriously monitored. This is quite ironic, considering that the word “resolution” derives from the Latin “resolutionem,” which literally translates as, “breaking things into simpler forms.”

With 2011 upon us, I hope we resolve to give our attention to the matters of the world which deserve our time, and memories.