Media Overload

In the article “Media Overload,” Stephen Collinson tracks the rapid growth of media consumption in society.  According to Collinson, the average American consumes around nine hours a day watching television, surfing the web, or using their mobile phones.  On average, people get about eight hours of sleep, add those nine hours and you got yourself 17 hours of the day planned already.  Leaving out seven hours for who knows what.  Maybe work?  If that is the case, the only human interaction you will get is with your co-workers who maybe a select few are part of your social network.  Collinson wrote, “some exerts question whether as consumers are swamped by information, they lose the ability to decipher fact from rumour, or find it hard to thing through what they hear.”  Today’s media focuses on getting news out as fast as possible and most of the time they have malicious facts.  They have a 24 hour deadline to release news out and with the rushing of news, it is hard to figure out what is factual and what is not. To make matters worse, every top news network would report the same story, so if one got it wrong, they all got it wrong leaving the public to me malinformed.  Collinson also wrote, “Google has announced a proposal for free wireless internet access for the whole of San Francisco...”   This to me was surprising as I didn’t expect an entire city to allow this.  Mainly because of the budget crisis and the amount of materials needed but Google being a big private company might have the funds to do it.  Still though, I’m not quite sure how this would affect society. I can only guess that it would definitely lower the amount of spending on the web as it will be free.  Yet, now you are allowing people to be stuck in this world.  It would be San Google, not San Francisco.