No more asking my friends if they knew if the Atlanta Braves had won the night before, or having to listen to boring news shows on the radio just in the hope of hearing the score. This was a life-changer! I mean, Tennessee Vols football (my other favorite team) played once a week in the fall and winter and I could follow them live on the radio, but keeping up with the Braves required a different level of commitment. Enter "The Paper". The Chattanooga Free Press had a sports section that remains to this day the bar of excellence for any paper I've ever read. They do an outstanding job covering area High School, College, and Pro Sports and we're not talking about a measly 4 page section. There were in-depth stories about the Vols, and the Braves! Mixed in with this wonderful content was the tranquility of retrieving the paper from the porch, settling on the couch, and immersing myself in a much bigger world.
My parents still receive a daily newspaper, and each time I visit, one of my favorite experiences is sharing the paper with my Mom and Dad as we read in the living room together. I will sometimes just lower my paper and breathe in the scene, capturing the peacefulness but also the temporal aspect of that moment, but of the life-span of newspapers themselves. For instance, just this month, our state-wide paper quit delivering the paper to households as well as retail outlets, and made the switch to an all digital edition.
I understand, the best that I can from the outside, the economics of the situation but sadness is still my prevailing emotion. I know that putting books, magazines, and now newspapers on our digital devices have made reading their content far easier than it has ever been in history. You access your mobile device and boom, the world delivered to your mobile OS. But the tactile feel of the newspaper cannot be replicated, and along with that I fear other routines may be lost as well. The shared communal experience of discussing, and passing around sections of the paper around the table or living room is much more difficult with our mobile devices. The mobile device is an isolated and jealous device, demanding your complete attention. Sharing is done through links and texts, whether you are in the next room or on a different continent. And this loss of community is not just happening at the household level. Plus the detail and the patience required to carefully devour the newspaper requires a different and increasingly rare character trait. So you can see we have lost not only the sharing of real content with each other but the diminishing content about the world around us. Local governments will be less afraid of reporters probing about waste and corruption. Our citizens will be less informed about not only our local civic matters, but state, national and world matters also. We have exchanged a mile of information for an inch of content. And even that content is increasingly biased, and designed to provoke, entertain but rarely inform. What kind of nation will we be when we have completed this exchange of the shallow in place of the deep? Informed citizens are required for a healthy republic and I think our present day conditions speak for themselves.
I guess my fear is that we've exchanged comfort for companionship in so many areas of our lives. Comfort and convenience are, in my opinion, both dangerous bedfellows. This may be related to my own growing sense of mortality, but I believe that our civilization has radically changed, and not for the better. Chaos is winning. Isolation is becoming the norm. Friendships are rare and mind-numbing entertainment is prevalent. Media has changed from a medium that we consumed at our leisure to something that consumes us throughout the day. Do you think our lives are richer as we navigate this minefield of community versus self?
The Bible is pretty clear that we do life best when we do it together. But that is more than a cliche on a reader-board. God is instructing us on the fact that He designed us to need each other, to relate, console, rejoice and to share and dream together. If we are no longer challenged or being held accountable in our families and communities, is it a surprise that selfishness is being substituted for morality? God and His truth are being mocked and ignored and both of these choices will result in our destruction as a people and as a nation. People that are misinformed, (or worse, not informed at all) are a people that can be easily misled. People who are apathetic about their world will not raise a finger in response when that world is being destroyed right before their very eyes. And even though I recognize that this is a terrible pivot in my stream of thoughts, I'm returning back to my original rant, that I going to really miss my friend, the newspaper.
