A very interesting point was mentioned about all the Gold Rushes and the amount of death that occurred because of this dash for riches. Another point I want to bring to the table is that of media hype and how it has changed little through out time. The news papers of the 19th century were saying that the gold was leaking out of the ground in the Black Hills, and that you could pick it like a crop and so on... Has our media not changed, and why do we still trust so blindly what the media says. Human nature has a tendency to blow things up and make things/situations seem better than they really are.
I thought this was an interesting tid-bit that would spur some good thinking, and this also goes to show that society rarely learns from its mistakes.
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Many parts of southern CA are portrayed in the media with images of people driving their Range Rovers and Hummer SUV's up to their million-dollar houses and this really gives people the wrong idea. You don't see the images of abject poverty and a high number of homeless. The same can be said of New York City. When I moved to CA a few years ago, I was also under the impression that it was a prosperous area, due to all the images of people laying around on beaches instead of slaving at mininum-wage jobs but I found the media hype to be very misleading.
This is an interesting thought. Millions of people just stopped what they were doing and rushed to wherever there had supposedly been findings of gold, not even thinking about what they would do it it wasn't true. It is a little sad how yet today, almost anything that is put on the news people will believe. It seems the American society will believe almost anything the media throws them.
Amanda, I think you touch on an important point. It was one thing for the press to release this false information, but it was another thing altogether for millions of people to drop their lives, pack up, and move west on a hunch. The Gold Rush is a refection of America's "get-rich-quick" mentality as much as it is a display of poor journalism.
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