Content Overload
Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, June 27th 2006 at 7:56pm
If nothing else, the internet surely has a hand in shaping how I receive information. Not only that, it influences how I expect to get at my information. Every now and then my father would ask me if I heard about so-and-so happening in some-faraway-place, and my reaction is almost consistently “that’s old news.” That’s because he still gets his information the old fashioned way, through TV, radio, and even print (ewww).
The Obsolescence of Traditional Media
I’m going to lump “print”, “TV” and “Radio” into one huge lump and called it “traditional media”. All these forms of communication share at least one thing in common, and that’s lag.
News on the radio is the least susceptible, with talk radio stations giving updates every hour or so… but how often do you listen to the radio? I think for most people that’s an activity limited to the morning and afternoon rush hours.
With television, a number of selected stories are researched, compressed, edited, compressed even more, and finally presented – usually from one perspective – at 6pm and 11pm on your local TV station. If you’re lucky you’ll get a 5 minute feature on some interesting story and the rest will be little more than headlines. You’ll hardly have enough information to go on.
Finally there’s print, which suffers the most from lag. Newspapers, as far as I know, come out once a day. This has the advantage that the stories tend to be fuller, researched more thoroughly and presented with more detail compared to a news cast. However it also has the disadvantage that whatever news you do get is at least a day old. Furthermore, you’re at the mercy of the reporter writing the story, and you have only his/her context to rely on. I haven’t read many newspapers, but my experience with the Gazette has been less than stellar. Despite the top notch comics pages, it seems that every time the Gazette reports on a topic that I’m knowledgeable about (computers, for example), they’re dead wrong. And if they’re wrong about the stuff that I know about, how can I trust them when learning about stuff that I don’t know about?
Magazines are a different story alltogether. Magazine articles are usually written some two months before they actually appear in print. This isn’t a big issue if you’re reading magazines about stuff that doesn’t change very rapidly, but in technology that’s just not the case. Countless times, during my subscription to Wired I’ve come across articles that no longer hold up against new information that came out between the time of writing and the day the magazine appeared at my door.
I no longer subscribe to the magazine, but I’ll occasionally read articles on their website.
The Web
It used to be that I’d logon to slashdot multiple times a day and learn about a ton of stuff that was going on in the world, especially in technology. New stories would come up every 20 minutes to an hour. But even slashdot has editors which painstakingly process each story, often skipping over stuff they don’t think should be published.
Thanks to the glory of the internet, you could always find a multitude of sources covering the same story and if you were so inclined, compare them to determine where they converge (or diverge, as it were). This would let you filter your content and factor out the perspectives of various reporters.
The Web 2.0
With blogs and RSS feeds, it suddenly became possible to track sites and topics that I’m interested in. I could be notified instantaneously (okay, maybe with a delay of 15 minutes or however often I check for new data) of new stories, new articles, new technologoy, new ideas… It’s a massive amount of information. I have my regular bloglines feeds and that’s more than enough.
Then digg came around, with a crazy scheme: Let the people decide what they want to read about. digg allows anyone to submit stories, and other people who see those stories can “digg” them. The more “diggs” a story has the higher it rises on the site, until it reaches the front page. This allows the readers to be their own editors, and the mass hive mind of the internet is the only filter. I subscribed to digg’s RSS feed for a while and quickly decided it was way too much information. Instead I settled on making digg.com my home page.
Yesterday, digg v3 came out, and it no longer carries only tech news. Now it covers all kinds of news, which is when I started realizing, with a mix of wonder and fear, there’s a lot of stuff on the internet. I can’t really keep up with all of it.
Revolution?
This kind of social computing is changing the way information propagates. It’s no longer at the beck and call of the mass media. There’s no editor in between a blogger and his/her readers, and there are fewer and fewer barriers to the distribution of information. Stuff that previously used to slip through the cracks in the mass media system can now get picked up by the web.
I think it’s really cool, and has the potential to revolutionize the way we think and communicate and learn. It also makes me worried that things like Net Neutrality might be lost (if big businesses and politicians get their way) and the whole thing will come crashing down.
(I swear I had a point when I started writing this – damn it. Next time I’ll make sure to plan an outline. :P)
