News

I look through my news feed on a short lunch break. No time to get anything today. Eat at my desk. Catch up a bit on the world outside. Then delve back into the world that makes my world possible.

Today I couldn't help but wonder.

What do we mean when we use the term news?

This question came in, wedged in between my appreciation of naked royalty to my consideration of mass evacuation and the horrible reality of elder abandonment during a state of emergency.

Out of these shimmering bits scrolling past my eyeballs the question coalesced and hovered. It's almost cliche for every request for commentary online to have at least one comment below lamenting the state of civilization and how "This isn't news!" or asking the highly befuddled and insincere question "How is this news?"

I suppose those comments fail to grasp information. What it is. They fail to understand the full extent of the process. Of the product. They confuse the components with the whole.

What we are all consuming is not news. It is all news.

It is impossible to read or watch "the News" as if it was a single thing. With a beginning. An end. Borders. An inside and outside. It's not an event that one gets ready for or commits to, like attending Mass or class.

What is News? Opinion pieces, editorials, press releases, fact statements, interviews, history, retelling, stories, anecdotes, gossip, forecasting, speculation, observation, hearsay, witnesses, reporting...

Each subsection an atom in a vast structure of information that is the news. A vast self-constructing writhing amorphous goop that you are responsible for wading through and not choking. Not letting it cover you entirely. Not letting it get into your eyes and blinding you.

Each node isn't news in itself. In much the same way that a lung or a humerus isn't a body. Nor, for that matter, is a body a person.

And a dead body? Oh, it was once a person. And since it's a body it's already decomposing and changing. It's an ecosystem. Dead or alive, it's an ecosystem with other newly dominant forms of life.

I wonder, is 'news' like the process of decomposition? This imagery plays well into the concept of the media as vultures. Culture vultures. But what about the cultures of bacteria and maggots? Purposeful if unpleasant. Digesting the zeitgeist.

Nourishing and cleaning up. Stripping away the flesh until there is only the underlying skeleton. The bones. But the bones collapse into a formless pile without muscles, without sinews, without flesh to hold it all in and give it shape. And then, over time, the bones turn to dust.