If you're not in the mood for rambling, just scroll down to the end.



Over a conversation today with friends, the unavoidable topic of the tsunami came up. However, it took an interesting twist when we started discussing the media coverage of the topic. It helps that one of the parties in the discussion was french, and thus forced us to take an international perspective on the matter. It appears that from a general (non-statistical) content analysis, it would appear that "we" are talking the matter to death.



I'm not sure if it's fair to say this but from what I gather, the information age brings with it an interesting and disturbing phenomenon - the flavour of the minute.



Now this isn't to imply that the tsunami wasn't devastating enough to warrant large-scale coverage on the news, nor that the efforts and contributions of each organisation and party brave enough to volunteer and contribute should go unnoticed. But the speed of information being delivered has increased significantly and concurrently, economic and business cycles have been shown to become shorter and shorter. I think it's apparent that a by-product of this is that the news has moved more towards 'entertainment' in a bid to provide a massive flood of information when it's relevant, and when there appears to be nothing new to report, the media head elsewhere.



Eventually, this only serves to promote a sensationalist media, aiming to focus on the next scandal or 'big story' that comes along. Already, the google news website has relegated the tsunami disaster below Brad and Jen's split.



To further illustrate this I tried a small experiment.



I typed in 'afghanistan' under news.google.com and came up with about 34,800 results. 'Iraq' had 160,000 results. 'Tsunami' had 138,000 results.



This 'test' is based on the assumption that the google news search engine uses the same parameters for these three searches, especially in terms of time frame and ignores inherent biases of geographical distributions (i.e. more news websites tend to be US-focussed)



What I infer from this is that while iraq, which was until recently the 'flavour', has ceded its post to the tsunami, which has almost caught up in numbers of news reports, in just a few days. This should be considered keeping in mind that the tsunami happened only days ago while iraq has been going on since march 2005.



Then again, this could reflect the number of casualties involved, or the increasing media prominence of asian countries. But the situation in darfur which only recently saw 70,000 lives deliberatly extinguished only garnered 6,480 hits, clearly a disproportionate figure.



I'm probably wrong in this, but I can't help but wonder if the outpouring of generosity in this scenario could be better utilised if all resources (i.e. donations) garnered weren't purely spent on the current issue at hand. Imagine how much could be done for the general global population if some of this money went to displaced refugees, or towards reearch towards averting an outbreak of the next big virus.



Back to my original assertion - the speed at which information is being delivered and shaped seems to lead towards a culture of constantly demanding more. And as our lives are lived moving from one 'flavour' to another, to get a regular 'fix' of new fads or gizmos, we are hurtling at breakneck speed towards a culture of unsustainability.



Things get started, but not ended.



I think I'm probably a good example of this. My bad habit has always been to think of ideas and plans, and not carry them out. Guess my new year's resolutions are to be aware of this, and #1, pick and choose plans more carefully, and #2, carry out the ones I really think should be executed - a regular "idea cull" so to speak.



Sorry for rambling. Hope you find out what caused the hives gerry. And for everyone who skipped straight to this bit, please say a prayer for my wife who will soon bravely head to sri lanka (with my blessing). I hope she learns the lesson of realising how fortunate she is - something I'm still trying to learn.