As I was sitting in my motorcar this morning in the parking lot at gym waiting for the opener staffer to arrive, I noticed that the eBoard of the Briindlee (sic) Mountain High Shule was still displaying a message wishing readers a “Happy New Year”. Last night as I was listening to the 1700 news on one of Huntsville’s local new broadcasts, one of the news readers (the less trustworthy one,) read some piece about “the New Alabama Immigration Law.” I immediately wondered if the council of thieves in Muntgum had changed last year’s law. Attention span was directed and I soon found out the news reader – the less credible one – was referring to last year’s law.
So what is the situation here? How long can you call something new? I am not talking about when the proper name of something contains the adjective, like the city of New York, which was new hundreds of years ago and has not been thought of as new for most of that period, but rather things that should be transient. How long is the year ‘new’? How long can a bit of news be ‘new’?
Obviously, information is new only once, when you first obtain it. So we might stretch ‘new’ to include the period of time between when the first person obtains the information and the last person obtains the information. But how do we know the latter? Is it even worth counting, especially for the gibble that we get from television ‘news’ programs?
I am told repeatedly that we live in the Information Age, which I suppose means we shall be making tools and weapons of information, and that I am falling behind in staying abreast of the new technologies. My reasons for not purchasing every new whatsis, other than already overfull pockets and too many power bricks and slabs, is economic. As a result, information is more widely available, faster than ever before, so the duration of ‘new’ should be less.
Accordingly, I think the limit of duration of ‘new’ should be wither one day or when I learn it, whichever is first.
And the newsreaders need to do a better job of this. Not just look pretty but do something.
