Ink and Earthquakes

A few weeks ago I was web-surfing when I came across a couple of top stories on Yahoo! The headline of the first one read:

“The Scope of the Haitian Catastrophe Widens Dramatically – Original Estimate of Death Toll Doubles.”

There were a few pictures underneath the headline of to go along with the story. One in particular stuck out to me: it was a picture of a crying Haitian woman with a look of pure anguish exuding out of her. I could feel my spirit getting heavier the longer I looked at her as I tried to imagine, even for a moment, the pain she must be going through.

Then I looked at the other top story:

“Billy Ray Cyrus Gets a New Tattoo.”

You're joking, right?

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t care about the new ink on the arm of Hannah Montana’s daddy (well actually, I don’t care, but that’s beside the point), it’s that the tattoo got as much attention, at least from the layout of the page, as a natural disaster that killed 300,000 people.

There’s something wrong with that picture.

I think that examples like this are indicative of a huge problem in our culture today. We are constantly being exposed (via internet, TV, newspapers, etc.) to more information than we know what to do with, whether that information is significant or not. As a result, all of that information seems equally important: Billy Ray Cyrus shares a stage with the earthquake in Haiti; the President’s State of the Union Address competes for viewers with the TV-show Lost; news from the war is equal with news from the NFL.

And here’s the kicker: when everything is important, nothing is.

I think that our primary problem is not with insufficient information, but with too much insignificant information.

That’s how Yahoo! can get away with juxtaposing “Death Toll Doubles” with “Billy Ray’s new tat.”

Either that, or it must be a really nice tattoo.

Ryan Wilson is a full-time student at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana, majoring in Christian Ministries.