All the News That's Fit...

I woke up this morning thinking about information overload. We have so many channels of information at our disposal and yet we use only a fraction of them. I don't watch TV much at all and have turned down my usage of the radio. I'd rather listen to what I have on my iPod. There used to be a limited number of media channels and so it was fairly safe to assume that most citizens in the United States were getting a lowest common denominator of information. Different from the single channel of information disseminated by state-controlled media but a similar idea. But now with the proliferation of channels available and the pervasiveness of the Internet (I agree, pervasive to those in highly populated areas not necessarily rural America) expectations of information consumers have changed. It seems like Chris Anderson was right with the whole Long Tail thing. This is the niche generation. More and more of us are opting for tailored news, only looking at our narrow interests. What happens to those serendipitous finds we used to come across in scanning the paper? Right, I am not a big Cubs fan but could always make conversation at the water cooler because I'd seen the headline about the previous games results.

We make assumptions about so many things and the biggest is that people are like us. Perhaps that's because we surround ourselves with like-minded folks and so that assumption is reinforced on a regular basis. We share similar interests and concerns with our friends. We read, listen to, view the same types of news and entertainment sources.

Can you believe it but I used to assume that everyone used libraries?! How could I be so naive? Anyway, one day in 1986 or so I was talking to a colleague, Bruce Foster, at Northwestern in Academic Computing. He was the man who enabled me to get every NOTIS employee an email account on Bitnet. Bruce destroyed my innocence (okay, I exaggerate!) by telling me that there was this whole group of people on campus who never darkened the doors of the library, preferring to work at their computers day and night. Now, in many ways I have become one of those people. I use the library more via the computer than in person, often grateful that I can go online and conduct a search when the library building is closed. My library school office is in the IUPUI library and so I am there at the end of each week. I also am a big user of the Evanston Public Library but more as a quiet place to write than to do research.

So what is it with control of the information I am consuming? I now have the capability to retrieve customized content on an up-to-the-minute basis but I have lost the peace and calm I used to associate with reading the paper or browsing shelves in the library. It seems as if by gaining more control over the information I consume that I have lost part of the gift that I associated with libraries and reading. This morning is just seems like All That News Is Giving Me Fits!!