The People Formerly Known as Informed & a Riff on Personal Information Management
Nicholas Carr had an interesting post recently where he thinks about a study released by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. The upshot: sites like Reddit, Digg, and del.icio.us have more diverse stories, but they’re also more fragmented. Hard news tends to be buried in streams of soft news, gossip, product announcements, and trivia.
Carr sums up by saying: “The study is, as the researchers note, just a snapshot, but it’s a telling one. It certainly doesn’t tell us everything about how people collect news online, but it does show us what happens when you put a crowd in charge of selecting news. The techno-utopians would have use believe that citizen journalism will provide an antidote to the mainstream media’s long-run shift away from hard news and toward soft news, that it will counter the trend toward news-as-entertainment and entertainment-as-news. But the indication so far is that the precise opposite is true. When you replace professional editors with a crowd or a social network, you actually end up accelerating the dumbing-down of news. News becomes a stream of junk-food-like morsels. The people formerly known as the audience may turn out to be the people formerly known as informed.”
And he’s right. But he’s also a little wrong. For example, I read a lot of hard news and more weighty things like literary criticism (did I just call that weighty?). However, I don’t tag these things often because they are transitory. An update on the Iraq war is not worth cataloging unless it’s exemplary prose, journalism, or both. Technical articles or “life-style” things often include things that you’d personally like to remember or reference and make up the bulk of the things that I tag (but a smaller portion of the things that I read). I think that overall readership analysis combined with social news sites would be very interesting and give a more accurate picture about people’s consumption of media. For example, how many people that fly through RSS feeds, Digg, and Reddit also fly through the NY Times, the WSJ, or London Times?
