Jumping the shark” is the term used to describe the moment when a television series resorts to a plot device so ridiculous that it must be a harbinger of the series’ imminent doom. Here’s how you use it in a sentence: “‘Boy Meets World’ totally jumped the shark when they did that time travel episode.” The phrase originated from an episode of “Happy Days” in which Fonzie literally jumps over a shark. From that moment on, the show’s happy days were numbered.

Ladies and gentlemen, the world has jumped the shark.

Or at least it’s showing all the symptoms: nuclear meltdowns, mustachioed dictators who can’t seem to take a hint, acts of seismic aggression. I almost can’t blame people for having circled the past weekend on their apocalyptic countdown calendars. Seems to me this whole human race spectacle definitely looks like it’s on the brink of cancellation.

But maybe I’m just watching too much “24.” It would be silly to disregard the possibility of a comeback. Hell, 15 percent of the artists on Billboard’s current top 20 were featured on “Now” CDs that were still within the single digits. Of course, this could represent either cause for hope or further proof that the world must be on its last legs.

The truly apocalyptic force at work is my sitting here, viewing the world as if it were a sitcom. Maybe this feeds into a general attitude of passivity. We all watch events unfold the way we watch horror movies, thinking the best we can do is to shout “Don’t go in there!” at the screen. I wonder if millions of people would have been convinced that Saturday was the beginning of the end had they not lived in a world in which word of new disasters springs up several times each day.

I can’t help but feel that, as a student journalist, I’ve been partially responsible for the proliferation of this attitude of rapt interest combined with perceived helplessness. We keep coming up with ways to make the absorption of information effortless, to make readers and viewers get wrapped up in the news the way they would a good novel. We can go from our living rooms to our computer screens to out in the world with our smartphones without missing a single step in a story’s development.

This quarter of columnizing has allowed me the opportunity to reflect on my experience as a reporter. In my previous life, I worked as a beat reporter then desk editor, caught up in the day-to-day race to stay ahead of news with little time to chew over the stories I was telling. There were times when I wondered if my role at The Daily was to deliver information or to stir the pot. Perhaps not only stir it, but crank up the heat, clamp on a lid and wait for all that steaming hot news to explode.

In this, my last column of the quarter, I’d like to believe that we, as reporters or as absorbers of news, can remember to approach stories as more than just big old messes we want to look at, but as opportunities to think about how we can clean them up.

Writing a weekly column this quarter has afforded me the time to do more of this thinking than in the past, and I’d like to find a way to carry it back into my other relationships with producing and consuming news.

Watch me put my Medill foot in my Medill mouth: Maybe the best thing for us to do is turn off the news, close out of Twitter and put down the newspapers (if anyone is still holding one). At least for enough time each day to analyze, to assess, to take stands. Being continually barraged by the world’s distresses means having less time to think about fixing them.

News claims to get more “interactive” as it becomes more omnipresent, but it is useful to allow ourselves the analysis that comes with uncertainty. The constant provision of information might actually preclude the interactivity it seeks to foster. Dedicating some time to the act of processing information as opposed to seeking it constantly might result in my viewing the world less like a studio audience member and more like a participant.

Ali Elkin is a Medill junior. She can be reached at [email protected]. Illustration by Sophie Jenkins.