2022 will be the year of structured media.

We entered January 2021 with a feeling of cautious optimism, with the chaotic and divisive nature of the election season seemed behind us and vaccines rolling out globally. For the first time in almost a year, we began to see the light at the end of the profound pandemic tunnel. “Return to normalcy is just around the corner,” promised global leaders and medical experts. Do you feel “normal” returned this year? Neither do I.

We thought this year would be a safe haven, a long-awaited return to structure and daily routine. But when rioters breached the capitol building in January, it was immediately evident that this year’s theme would not be stability.

This year, we have grown conditioned to chaos. Countless headlines on topics such as vaccine mandates, school closures, and two devastating strains of coronavirus, and we still have no relief from the constant stream of information disrupting our everyday lives.

• Take a jab at it — How many different COVID vaccines have been approved for use by the World Health Organization (WHO) since the start of the pandemic? (answer below)

Remember: misinformation is a product. It’s manufactured to invoke fear, anger, and action. We must remember that the truth just…is. It doesn’t require debate or cable TV opinion journalists. Truth is not sensational. Truth is boring. Truth doesn’t sell many ads. Truth isn’t designed to fit into a news feed or on prime time cable. And that leaves a lot of open space to fill our social and news feeds with…a lot of misinformation, sensationalism, and garbage.

So with that, I believe 2022 will be the “Year of Structure” in how we obtain information. We’ve realized that all the open space in these media and social feeds has not served us well. We want to consume our information confidently. We want relevancy. We want objectivity. And candidly, we want less of, in more defined chunks, so that we can spend more time on the things that really matter.

Thank you for your readership this year. I look forward to continuing to share my ideas with you in the coming year.

We were flooded with hundreds of thousands of articles related to the Coronavirus in 2021. Source: Obi Onyeador on Unsplash

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