Can we lead a minimalistic lifestyle?

I am currently in the 5th chapter of the Guns, Germs and Steel book by Jared Diamond and it is getting a bit boring with information overload. There is too much of fine details which are not my area of interest, it probably is for someone else.

I have not been doing enough reading over the weekend or been thinking about the questions that prop up in my mind and don't have much to express in this post. If you are reading ahead you might feel bored! I am going to think and write simultaneously now as I don't have any processed info to type.

My focus today will be on world affairs. There seems to be temporary peace in Lebanon atleast according to the BBC. I got to bring in the BBC here since I am afraid that most news agencies today do not do justice to the concept of reporting. Most reports are biased and they are partial in reporting some and ignoring others. So ultimately a news gets reported or left out based on the editor of the news media and not based on what the population needs. The editor weilds great power here since the public's opinion is driven based on what every individual reads (most of the time at least) and what can be read is detemined by the editor. Sometimes it looks scary that the mass opinion could be so easily manipulated.

If every reader was a thinker then what they read is carefully taken in, assimilated, thought through and ingested or discarded based on the credibility of the information. Unfortunately that is not the case. Most people who read the papers or watch television are people who are susceptible to emotional reactions and they can be easily influenced to form an opinion that is carefully engineered by media personnel for their own vested interests.

My work involves launching an e-newsletter on a monthly basis and my client takes a lot of effort to understand what is important or attractive for their redears and constantly improve on the content to increase readership, clicks etc. One of the things recently being discussed is something called Head Map. I did not know what it meant initially and later found out that this is a controlled experiment that is conducted to understand the user's reading behaviour. What happens from a layman's perspective is that the subject of the experiment wears an equipment that monitors where the user looks and traces his / her eyeball movement and the researcher tries to understand the normal beaviour of the user by observing the patterns in multiple subjects.

I am fairly certain major news agencies would be employing this technology to determine which part of the newpaper or the website the reader is most interested in and highlight the latest news in those locations so they generate maximum output with minimum inputs. I am also certain that this technology does not come cheap, which means that companies that spend on such researches needs to take their investment out as soon as possible. This brings in the bias that I talk about earlier. So the editor is forced to highlight news that is more attractive to read for a casual reader rather than the pertinent one which might be boring and do not generate enough interest for the reader to spend sustained amount of time with the newspaper or the website.

Then the question is can an entity survive being an idealistic media source which is unbiased, reports every news as it happened without a twist or an element of personal gain. My answer would be that it is next to impossible. Then the next question is how far can a news agent go so that the entity can sustain its existence and yet do as little damage as possible to the actual news.

Fortunately or unfortunately we are living in a world that is on a path to total consumerism at a steady and consistent pace. Whether consumerism is good or bad is a debate that will rage on for a long time but what is sure for now is that the world is firmly set on the path of attaining total consumerism. We can't blame a single or group of countries here but everyone is responsible for this outcome. All developing countries are aspiring to be developed countries and all under-developed countries want to become developing countries and all developed countries want to stay developed. The end outcome is a phenomenol rate of consumption of resources of this planet. The rate of consumption is so high that many fear that a lot of natural resources would disappear even before an alternate source can be found.

Forget the world and its complexity, I personally find it hard to lead a minimalistic lifestyle. I am so ingrained in todays comforts that it is extremely hard to give up on something that you are used to.

I am going to pick this topic up sometime in future again with more detailed thinking since today the idea was to continue the habit of entering a blog on a daily basis to keep the thinking stimulated and busy!