Information Overload

Dear Corporate America,

Please stop being fake.

Please stop making fake advertising.

Please stop making fake products.

Please stop hiring fake employees who pretend to care about me but really don’t.

Please stop faking a smile when I enter your store.

Please stop making fake customer service call centers that send me to people who do not care about what I need or want.

Please stop pretending you care about something besides your company.

Please stop sending me updates about how you are donating 0.0001% of your profits to preserve one acre of old-growth forests in Mongolia. continue reading this post

I have heard many people make comments along the lines of, “I am so uninformed because I just never have time to read the newspaper” or “I don’t have time to read the newspaper, and therefore, I don’t know what is happening in our world.” These remarks have always been peculiar to me because I hardly ever read the newspaper, but I still consider myself “informed”. I was tired of people somehow linking my duty to be an informed citizen with the amount of time I spend reading a newspaper. I’m a digital learner, and I don’t need a cup of coffee and a newspaper to inform me about what is happening around me.

But instead of dismissing those who think a newspaper is linked to my duty to be an informed citizen, I went on a quest. I took the day off, and instead of working, I actually read my local newspaper (The Indianapolis Star) all the way through. I decided to read every word of every story just so that I could find out what I was missing. Not only did I read every article, but I also went through and calculated what percentage of the newspaper is dedicated to advertisements. I wanted to know if, by not reading the newspaper, whether I was missing news or if I was missing advertisements. I went through every page of the paper and blocked each advertisement and calculated the total surface area of the all the advertisements in the paper just to see how much marketing penetration there is in a newspaper.

So, what did I find out? continue reading this post

Last week, I heard that President Obama was going to be delivering an address to students and that students “had” to watch it and that there was going to be a “mandatory lesson plan” that “would ask students to think about how they could support the President’s policies”. Ok, so that alarmed me. I didn’t think the President should be sending out lesson plans that involve students exploring ways to support the President’s policies. That smells too much like a dictatorship, and I don’t like dictatorships.

So, what did I do? Did I go turn on my radio and listen to what other people were saying? Did I run to my newspaper and read the editorials? Of course not. I just went online, read the text of the speech, and then came to my own conclusion, a conclusion based on facts and not on opinions. continue reading this post