News Addiction

Hello. My name is Lucy and I am addicted to the news.

I am guilty of being a news addict. I have the BBC News feed installed on the toolbar on my laptop at work. It screams at me anywhere from zero to three times an hour - telling me that somebody has relapsed on their drug rehab' program or a country has launched some satellite into space.

Why do I care? Where did this addiction start?

My news addiction was fuelled even further yesterday after visiting the news website (because my feed hadn't popped up for at least an hour), and finding that a huge fire was raging in central London. The pictures looked great - sorry, I mean worrying.

What had caused this fire? My first thoughts were actually along the lines of the Buncefield oil storage depot fire - that some accident had occured. Albeit a bit of a shame, but maybe it was caused by a huge cock-up. Some daft guy had dropped a ciggy that he was smoking outside on his break.

But then of course, the author of the article had inserted the magical words - 'terrorism.'

What - again? Really? Terrorists have struck? Now I was really interested.

I was having flashbacks to my first associations with 'instant-live-as it happens' news coverage. It was sometime in 2001, and I was back at my parents house for the summer break from university. I was bored, with nothing better to do so I switched on the television. I thought that maybe I could catch a funny quiz show or a home improvement program (with which I could fantasise that I actually owned the house on tv).

But instead, I was confronted with apolocalyptic images of what I considered to be the most iconic city in the world falling apart at the seams. I stood there watching footage of one of the twin towers burning and the news reader seemed as at much of a loss as I was as too explain what was going on.

When somebody in the newsroom decided that maybe footage of the burning tower was getting a bit boring, they streamed footage of the plane slamming into the tower instead. I think it was taken from footage of a drain inspection on the street below that was being done by a group of firemen. The fireman holding the camera heard a plane flying very low overhead, and turned his camera to the sky to see what was going on.

Then WHAM.

A plane crashed into a skyscraper just like that.

Just when you thought you were going to get a cuddly little program about brain-numbing-nothingness, WHAM.

Here you go, why don't you have something that confuses you. Just when you thought that you'd figured out how the world was working. WHAM.

As if it wasn't enough that I couldn't understand what was going on, the producers looped the footage so the plane slammed into the skyscraper again and again and again. It felt like I was being whacked with a big plank, and every time I was hit all the bones in my body broke, but again I was hit with the plank, being pulverised into a slushy puree.

I was thinking that I didn't want to see this, that maybe I should turn the tv off, but I stood there transfixed. My Mum was out somewhere, and my Dad was upstairs sleeping as he worked on a nightshift. I didn't have anyone that I could turn too and say 'What the f**k?!'

I stood there for what did actually seem like an eternity, staring at the tv when the news reader sounded like they had been broken out of their spell as well. All of a sudden, the footage of the plane slamming into the tower changed angle, to show the plane slamming into the tower from another angle.

It was only when the news reader clarified that this footage was actually of a second plane crashing into the second tower that I reached for my phone and started calling my friends. I asked my friends if they were watching the tv, and if they weren't, I told them they should turn the tv on.

I spent the next few days after that event wondering if the world was coming to an end. I thought that America would instantly find out who destroyed what America presented to the world as their ideal, and correspondingly dish out punishment.

But as it happened, this horrifying experience turned out to be just another day in the world of politics. The world didn't come to an end. Sure enough the Gulf War started up again (I was only about 10 years old when the first one was going on - and I'll post about that in due course), but apart from that nothing much seemed to change.

Or did it?

Why do I get scared when there's a huge fire or an explosion reported in the news? What am I afraid of? Why do I suddenly find that I'm refreshing the news pages more often than I'm saving files for the work that I've done in the office?

Why am I a news addict?