Bree Nordenson in The Columbia Journalism Review talks about how the abundance of information on the Internet has shortened attention spans, reduced the chances of serendipitous exposure to public affairs news and analysis, and led to a “my news, my world” echo-chamber –
Markus Prior writes in his book, Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections, “Political information in the current media environment comes mostly to those who want it.” In other words, in our supersaturated media environment, serendipitous exposure to political-affairs content is far less common than it used to be. Passive news consumers are less informed and less likely to become informed than ever before.
Our access to digital information, as well as our ability to instantly publish, share, and improve upon it at negligible cost, hold extraordinary promise for realizing the democratic ideals of journalism. Yet as we’ve seen, many news consumers are unable or unwilling to navigate what Michael Delli Carpini (dean of the Annenberg School for Communication) refers to as the “chaotic and gateless information environment that we live in today.”
As information proliferates, meanwhile, people inevitably become more specialized both in their careers and their interests. This nichification—the basis for Wired editor Chris Anderson’s breakthrough concept of the Long Tail—means that shared public knowledge is receding, as is the likelihood that we come in contact with beliefs that contradict our own. Personalized home pages, newsfeeds, and e-mail alerts, as well as special-interest publications lead us to create what sociologist Todd Gitlin disparagingly referred to as “my news, my world.”
Although it is titled ‘Overload!’, it goes beyond the attention overload argument in Nicholas Carr‘s controversial Is Google Making Us Stupid? piece in The Atlantic last year and explores some important issues related to media literacy and what it means for journalism.
In comparison, Clay Shirky‘s arguments in his two part interview with CJR seem somewhat simplistic. Yes, attention overload is a generational construct and the newspaper business model is broken, but it is true that unless you are truly motivated, it’s easy to be sucked into an online echo chamber of your own creation, where it’s almost impossible to serendipitously discover an alternative point of view.
The Media Re:public project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University explores some of these issues in a nuanced manner. I would specifically recommend the recently released Media Re:public paper series with an excellent overview of the legacy media vs. participatory media debate (PDF) by lead researcher Persephone Miel and an excellent paper on media literacy (PDF) by Dan Gillmor.
Columbia Journalism review also has some great articles in the Overload! series, which I’ll dig into later today.
