![]() ![]() Is Thoreau really arguing that misfortunes touching friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens aren’t worthy of attention? That apparent indifference chimes neatly with his reputation as a cold fish, a man more interested in birds and trees than humanity.īut what Thoreau was really lamenting was the way that the sheer scale of news can commodify a tragedy, making its victims seem oddly interchangeable. It’s a bracing indictment of media culture that, at first reading, doesn’t seem fair. “If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter-we never need read of another.” “I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper,” he groused in one of his most famous put-downs. Thoreau concluded that following current events so closely was seldom worth it. After a night’s sleep the news has become as indispensable as the breakfast.” “Hardly a man takes a half-hour’s nap after dinner,” he wrote, “but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?’ as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinel. Long before smartphones offered breathless updates on political developments and Hollywood celebrities, Thoreau worried that the lure of news had become addictive. “We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the new,” he told readers in Walden, “but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” Thoreau wondered if such innovations as a transatlantic cable line would make his fellow Americans smarter or merely more distracted. Then, as now, an exponential leap forward in the velocity and reach of news raised concerns about information overload. Industrial printing made newspapers ubiquitous. The invention of the telegraph had dramatically increased the speed at which news could travel. But in removing himself slightly from his neighbors, Thoreau was declaring his personal independence from a number of preoccupations, including the nineteenth-century news cycle.Īs a news consumer, Thoreau faced challenges similar to our own. ![]() Thoreau claimed it was a coincidence that he moved to a small cabin near Walden Pond, Massachusetts, on Independence Day. ![]()
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