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Steven Hanley hackergotchi picture Steven
Hanley
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Fri, 08 Jul 2005

Just when you were getting ready to ignore the place... - 15:08
When I saw mention late Wednesday night of the location of the 2012 Olympics being announced, my thoughts were running along the lines of, well that gives me just another reason to ignore London for some time in 2012. I was living in Sydney during the Olympics in 2000, I did not go to any events, heck for one week during the Olympics I was in Perisher, skiing.

I have to once more admit, I only watch sports that I do myself, or am keen to do. Cycling (all disciplines), most winter Olympics disciplines (especially skiing, both XC and DH), Adventure races (even with the pathetic races and coverage that does get aired anywhere currently). In the Summer Olympics I may watch the road race or mtb on tv (though getting tickets to attend the mtb live was difficult in Sydney as that event sold out first). Thus when the announcement was made my reaction pretty much mirrored that of Giblets on fafblog, "Now Giblets gets to ignore the Olympics in England!".

Of course just as I was gearing up and getting ready to ignore London some more 7 years from now, some shit happened. Though it is a little annoying that there really is no way to ignore this currently. Sure it is a tragedy and all that, however I fear the media is herding us all too far into the US culture of fear.

This morning I was talking about this with an mtb friend who is a clinical psychologist, he mentioned, when he and his wife were living in Canada back around 1994 they were visited by an American friend, who when some minor mildly terrorist related incident occurred, she sat glued to the 24/7 tv coverage on the US TV stations for the duration of her stay in a state of mild panic, while the coverage itself was mostly pointless. Items like interviewers talking to other interviewers with no new information or anything of importance going on, constantly pushing their message of fear further into the psyche of the viewing public.

This has not changed much, it has probably worsened since 1994, and it is spreading far beyond the US. Last night all 5 free to air stations spent a lot of time covering the same stuff, heck two of the channels were simply broadcasting the CNN coverage. Even with no new information they continually reiterated what they knew and tried to present other angles on the information we all by now knew.

We can be thankful for the Internet, if you do not want to you are able to avoid having excessive amounts of crap forced upon you, this is quite probably more evidence of the future of entertainment, being able to chose what you want to interact with and not having it pushed at you. You can find out a lot of information about the situation in London online, or you can ignore it.

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