There is actually almost 8 billion, now.
Maybe he meant 4 billion electronically connected people on the planet.
(X may be something like "local pickle farmers protest new holiday". The topic doesn't matter, oddly enough, it's audience size that counts)
If you scan the first column, it's very weak. There not much of an argument or factual substrate. Then scan the second. Completely different opinion. Same crappy argument quality. Sometimes you can go nine or ten columns like this.
I'm left with opinion on those days that not much of anything has happened regarding X. But folks still need views!
Consuming news in this fashion is a great way to disconnect emotional manipulation from actual news. When they're directly trying to manipulate you, you begin to learn the rules of the game.
In a strange way it validates how well off we are, particularly in the U.S., that outrage needs to be manufactured in this way. Of course the impacts are extremely negative and no journalist ever gets views or prizes for "hey it is important but society won't collapse and we are pretty well off..."
In the end it is a number of factors and cycles between the public and the media:
1) News is now a entertainment with eyes to attract.
2) The public loves death, destruction and crisis. "We like to watch things die from a safe distance; better you than us."
3) Journalists don't get any personal or professional benefit from covering important but "mundane" things. Look at who wins the Pulitzer.
4) On an individual level, people will still find things that are problematic regardless of how well off they are (see "First-World" problems).
5) Knowing of 4) there is a typical over-reaction to actual things of importance; but the reaction is hysterical.
"A kid was kidnapped today, that could happen to mine!"
6) Now that every individual, isolated event can be distributed to millions; every single crisis abstracted to be systematic and endemic (based on 4) and 5) above); it is not that bad things happen, it is that there needs to be a solution and we need to solve for it.
"We've got to do something about this kidnapping crisis, I see it on the news all the time!"
7) Realizing 6) the media can now take political positions and feed into this need to produce more stories that satiate that.
A year later...parents are charged with neglect after letting their kids walk home from school alone. Turns out it was a relative who kidnapped the kid. Also turns out there were only 10 of these this year in your community and the chances of this are much smaller than they were years ago, but all of them hit the news, so...
The internet has made everybody a brand. Reporters are learning to be brands instead of data sources.
Exactly. There are four billion people on the planet. We are all connected instantaneously. If there isn't something happening every minute that's completely disgusting and outrageous, the species isn't diverse enough. The question is why we want it delivered into our day-to-day emotional lives -- and who is benefiting from having that kind of transfer happen.
No matter how bad something is, we can accept that it's bad, decide on measures to take (sometimes drastic measures) and continue on with our lives. Humans have lived their entire evolutionary existence like this. War over in Europe? Bombing of Pearl Harbor? I guess we may have to send millions off to war. A lot of people we know are going to die.
It's only when we get the direct, back-and-forth, highly-charged emotional interaction that we become more-and-more angry, make irrational choices. We try to up one another with displays of our outrage and pain. Become unhappy and emotionally unstable. Then, guess what? We can share that emotional state with millions of others through the net!
My advice to people who are beginning to wake up to this, but still want to know what the current political discussions are? Read well-constructed opinion columns. Good ones are required to have thesis and supporting arguments. So you get bias, facts, and a look at somebody's reasoning. I scan opinion columns from all sides of the political debates. I find I lose about 24 hours on learning what current events are. And I'm okay with that trade-off. A serial killer 1500 miles away doesn't require me to gear up and go out with a SWAT team. It can wait. 99% of this can wait.