All pile on – is it the news or the way we see it?

I was about to say this has been the most intense and packed year for news I can remember. The Arab Spring, the English riots, the killing of Bin Laden, the Japanese Tsunami, the hacking scandal, global economic crises and much more besides has made 2011 feel bewildering, turbulent and exciting. But then I remembered 1991 (Moscow coup, collapse of the USSR, Croatian war) 2001 (George W Bush, British election, 911 attacks, Afghanistan war) and other years and start to wonder: is it the news or the way we see the news now?

When I was at school the boys in my class went through a phase of playing a strange game called “all pile on”. It consisted of picking out the weakest looking kid in the playground and jumping on him for a minute before getting off and picking on somebody else. It only ever lasted a minute – after that it would feel played out and time to move on. Though they would tend to concentrate on the same few victims and rotate between. There have been times when the news has felt a bit like that.

For those of us who thrive on detail this has meant both good and bad things. The media in general seems to concentrate its fire at the moment which means you find out a lot, in some depth and at some length. And it is always true that when you scratch the surface of anything it becomes more interesting. But we also seem to have become so spoiled with sensational news that after a few days we slightly lose interest. And then something else comes along for us to get very excited about, very intensely for a short time.

Normally you might think this is bad – rather shallow and giving us the impression of depth of understanding without the reality of it. The themes however have recurred – so the Arab Spring keeps springing back, the hacking scandal keeps giving new scandal. So as consumers our residual knowledge of these stories is growing – we need fewer back to basics reminders.

I’ve always been sceptical about analysis of the “news cycle”. It seems like a rather pointless post hoc rationalisation. But the intensity with which we jump on stories, squeeze the hell out of them and then move on for a bit feels a little different to the past. Either that or 2011 really is a bizarre news year. I’m not sure. Now….back to that Libyan revolution.