Change your Signal

Time to change the Signal....

Control your information life…

This stems from the other article I wrote about don’t worry be happy, its time people took control of the way they receive their information, be it news, information, the state of the world .. whatever, and stop being just a passive individual willing to eat the feeds of the negative so called “news” coming from commercial TV networks, magazines , radio and newspapers. Lets face it, TV news is just a platform to feed lots of horror stories on the latest flu epidemic, latest terrorist bomb, or murders etc, nothing about scientific discovery, or things that really inertest you. Radio has become totally irrelevant, with FM shock jocks talking about where they found their dirty undies last night, or what come out of their kids nose this morning. Newspapers are nothing more than advertisements disguised as news or information, or paid political announcements. Magazines are an amalgam all the above. Time to take control.

How to take control.

Well stop watching TV news, and listening to Radio, and read what you want. Use google, use the net, and read really what’s interests you, and you will find that suddenly the world isn’t this big terrorist camp, war ridden, plague ridden world. Not to deny these things are going on, but these things have been going on for 1000’s of years, we just didn’t have some media moguls feeding us lots of negative crap about how many car smashes happened today, or how many people died in some natural disaster. Get into podcasting, listen to what you want, not what packer wants you to hear with the occasional cute puppy story thrown in to try and balance all the terror. Get into RSS feeds on particular scientific, medical, SCI FI stories or whatever things interest you.

INFORMATION, should be selective about your interests, what drives you and your passions. Maybe if more of us got our view on the world this way, everyone might stop thinking how bad everything is for a change, and lighten up, and stop being so mean and selfish to each other. The current media feeds on everything negative, people in turn become negative, because its so much easier to be negative about everything than positive. You can start being more positive by controlling what you see and hear by taking these steps:

• Get a PVR (personal Video recorder, a hard drive unit that records TV). We all complain that there is nothing on TV, then control it, select what you want to watch, there are so many DVD’s and Box sets of good TV shows, watch them instead. Get a PVR and programme it to only record the shows, and doco’s you want, so what if they are on 2am in the morning.. get your PVCR to do all the work.

• Get and Ipod , and control what you hear be it music, podcasts etc. Hear info and science shows, debates, sci fi discussions whatever, and stop listening to the 90% of dribble coming from your FM radio or the 90% advertisements.

• Use the Net to get the rest of your once printed material, besides saving trees, you will have full control of the topics that interest you, and you will avoid the negative linear feeds of news papers and magazines.

* Use twitter! Yes twitter is not just useless tool for saying the last time you fed your cat, follow organisations, news feeds, people that have interests you like, and would like to engage in. News does not have to be passive, but interactive. Information exchange should be social. Twitter can make this happen. And if you have an iphone or other type of smart phone, why do you not have twitter? Look at how valuable it has been in recent events in Australia for the distribution of information.

For a long time now I have done most of these things to keep myself update on things that interest me, and its amazing on what a brighter world it seems when you are not fed the totally negative self serving rubbish of 90% of media outlets, epically the nightly so called “news”. Try it for a month and see how well your outlook on life becomes. As Captain Mal would say “CHANGE THE SIGNAL.”