Associazione di Promozione Sociale
iscritta al RUNTS con n° di repertorio 91330
We are living in a truly extraordinary era: only in the last fifty years, we have experienced enormous changes. Despite this, the level of fear and uncertainty we are witnessing is unprecedented. But unlike other historical moments, when the world has experienced great tragedies or gone through periods of enormous uncertainty, this is the first time that information is playing a leading role due to the spread of headlines, news and images designed to alarm us. A phenomenon amplified even more by social media.
The enormous amount of news from which we are bombarded, some accurate, others not, travels today at ever higher speeds, creating a climate of uncertainty and fueling anxiety and fear.
In times like these, we must remember to always think critically in the face of news that tries to creep into our minds. If we don’t, we’ll let someone else do it for us, attracting our attention. Whatever news you feed your mind with every day, it will create your perception of reality. Exactly as it happens for your diet: if you feed on junk food every day, you will have health problems, you will be overweight and you will not have a good physical appearance. So, if we don’t control our phobias and aren’t careful about what to focus our mind on, the outside world will do it for us.
Choosing what to focus on is your choice and your responsibility. If you read any newspaper today or watch the news, you will easily be slivered by negative news and depressing stories falling into the trap of conditioning, making you believe that the good times are gone forever and that the future is really uncertain.
Whatever news you constantly focus on, it will become your real life experience. As Enrico Brignano says: “My grandmother watches six or seven newscasts a day. At the end of the day she experienced only tragedies.”
Think about how the reality of all those who acquire information exclusively from the mass media can be filtered, which are certainly not designed to condition your mind in the best way or to stimulate you to obtain a better quality of life. An Italian today watches television on average for four hours a day (five since the pandemic began, and this is the national average!): think about what kind of information he is conditioning his reality with! What will be your beliefs? What will be your quality of life? What will be the results of his thoughts and actions? If you put garbage in your mind, garbage will come out! And if we are not sitting there in front of the television, we will surf the internet or listen to a news on the radio, or read the newspaper. Whatever the medium, you need to know that the mass media must generalize, they must simplify something complex to make it understandable and in a small space.
We must also remember that today, information must sell: it is a commodity, it is a business. And what sells the most? Certainly negative news, those that generate pain, fear: they sell more because they become for us a necessity to learn more and to defend ourselves from threats and dangers. It is an atavistic conditioning that resides in our cerebellum, the oldest part of our brain: for primitive man it was important to know if outside his cave there was a hungry lion ready to tear him apart to make a succulent lunch! And so is our bulimia for negative news, without us even realizing it! That is why we have such a concentration of negative news.
Like moods, information is as cyclical as the seasons. We all go through difficult times. In the same way, information also amplifies periods of crisis, shouting headlines on the front page, sometimes inflating the news, announcing fake news only sometimes denied in some remote corner of the newspaper.
If you and I are walking down the street – and we see the poster of a newspaper that says that everything is fine – we look at each other, smile and continue walking: everything is wonderful! If, on the other hand, we read that a cyclone is coming, suddenly we become alarmed and stop to buy the newspaper to learn more. So, inherently, the mass media gives their audience what the audience responds to (by buying, clicking, or increasing ratings).
If we are not aware of this mechanism, and therefore if we do not choose how to feed our mind, that is, with information that can help us better understand the world around us, to improve the quality of our lives in an intelligent and more chosen way, then it will be easy to be seduced by the mass media. Because everywhere you turn these days, someone has imagined a darker color for you and for our future.
The challenge to be overcome today is to know these phenomena to learn to control what goes into your head. The alternative is to let the outside world decide for you and let your perception of reality be completely controlled by the information you have available and focus on every day.
Those who succeed in our society are those few people who do not just swallow the information that is provided to them, but who rather seek positive and constructive news that nourishes their lives, their dreams, their hopes and a positive vision of the future.
We live in the information age and information shapes our lives. Choose the news to focus on carefully, because this is what determines what you will do and how you will feel today.
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Co-Founder and President. Pioneer in Italy for a more constructive approach to the news, he is the publisher since 2001 of the news website BuoneNotizie.it (a sort of initiation to move the focus on the half glass full) awarded by Apple, the Presidency of Italian Republic, IlSole24ORE and several universities.
Italiano