Microinformation
Most of you web-addicts might be going through the same process as I am: suddenly days, sometimes weeks, go by without me checking back to my google reader. Paying regular attention to twitts from the right people, keeping an eye on facebook and having regular conversations at your geek-filled workplace will do the trick.
Those are our social filters to make sure we only end up reading the titles (I’m not even talking about their body anymore, google reader was great at allowing me to just browse all the blog’s titles) of the posts that might be relevant to us.
Main reasons are the bigger and bigger flow of information and the speed at which we can read information. I can’t remember the last time I read a long article online, and barely the last time I read something longer than a page on paper.
That’s also because everything is real-time. It’s becoming rare that an event occurs during a few days, we don’t know about it, and then have one article from one source compiling all the events necessary information in the way we like it, giving relevance to the aspects we care about.
Now we read about the event (be it a conference, a war or an election) in real-time, from multiple sources, that already act as filters to make sure we are only informed about the aspects we care about, leaving out all the paragraphs we would skip in a longer article.
Which helps killing bad journalism with crappy reports, but also sort of kills the role of a journalist that only reports on facts, completely unbiased. There’s real-time reporting from our social network for that! Long texts only make sense if they add something new to the facts: opinion. Which is great, as long as it isn’t hidden as “factual reporting”.
Unless there are opinions in a text, it is just an outdated way of transmitting information.
