There is also an unprecedented deluge of news and information and an insistent pressure to keep abreast of it all. A well-known British journalist was reminiscing about his early days in radio news. He joined the BBC in the 1930s at a time when there was no regular news bulletin. In his first week, a bulletin was scheduled and he arrived at the studio to watch it being broadcast. The presenter sat at the microphone and waited until the time signal had finished. He then announced somberly: “This is the BBC Home Service from London. It is one o’clock. There is no news.” The view of the times was that news would be broadcast if anything happened to warrant it. Compare this with our own saturated processes of news reporting 24 hours a day on a multitude of channels and media. It isn’t that there is more happening in the world now than there was in the 1930s. But there is now a ferociously hungry news industry, which generates, and sometimes manufactures, news stories around the clock to nourish its own bottom line. All of this adds to the general sense of crisis that permeates 21st-century culture.

Ken Robinson, 2011, Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative