More news, less knowledge?
E&P's David Hirschman says having endless information at his fingertips is turning him into a skimmer.
Is this how everyone is reading online these days?
The news is all a click away, and it's possible to sift among thousands of newspapers and magazines from all around the world online (not to mention emags and blogs), parsing and digesting snippets of information. As a result I feel a kind of obligation to be more or less up to date on a wide variety of subjects, simply to keep up.But I realize more and more that my up-to-date knowledge of events has actually become shallower, and that the information doesn't affect me all that much. Twenty-two dead in Iraq bombing. Married magazine editor caught with call-girl in airplane bathroom. An event pops up, gets knocked around the blogosphere for a while, enters my consciousness, and then fades out just as quickly. There's always a new journalism scandal or a bit of unexpected intrigue, booting the last one into obsolescence.
These days, I usually don't make it all the way through an article. I'll read the lede and the nut graf, and maybe I'll scroll down to hunt around for hidden relevant bits, but if I take the time to finish every article I won't be able to get through (or, at least, to) all the other stuff that is part of my daily news diet, which I consume, for the most part, online.
May 11, 2006 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(0)
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