December 30th, 2008
Information Overload, Media Literacy, the Internet Echo Chamber, and Journalism’s Search for Relevance
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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.”
