In Over Your Head

Thanks For Telling Me (but I already knew)

Is it just me, or are newspapers becoming kind of quaint?

I was on the bus this morning looking over at the headline on one of those free dailies they hand out in subways. It said “Coup in Honduras!”

I was like, well no shit. I found out about this while it was actually happening. Where were you then???

Simultaneously over the past five days I’ve been receiving text messages and emails from people all over going “Michael Jackson is dead OMG” and “Billy Mays is dead WHOAHHHH,” and I’m like, uh… yeah.

Those of us on the extremes of information spreading mechanisms are used to this. I found out about all three of the events above through Twitter and Reddit, where there’s very little friction. And I spent minutes a day on those sites. The same could’ve happened if I were on CNN, though.

Thing is, I know I’m not the average. Neither are you if you’re reading this. But this feeling of ours is increasingly normal. Twitter is everywhere and recommendation sites like Reddit are known to most, even if we don’t visit them.

Information is spreading with less friction than ever. Have you ever wondered how much faster can it get?

… hold on, I just got a text message– maybe it’s someone else telling me yesterday’s news. 😉

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Joe Gannon

Comments

5 responses to “Thanks For Telling Me (but I already knew)”

  1. Steve Averill Avatar
    Steve Averill

    My kids keep telling me ‘hey daddy look a newspaper!” and tell them about horse and buggies.

    Reply
  2. Emma-Louise Avatar
    Emma-Louise

    Have no TV (well no TV channels. Go Pirate Bay go).

    Since I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve found I don’t really even need to go to news websites.

    I remember a story about a waiter (before the internet) who didn’t read the news. When challenged by a businessmen how this could be – he said he heard everything he needed to from the people who came to the restaurant so why waste his time?

    Einstein didn’t remember phone numbers. Why tie up brainpower when you can write stuff down?

    Feel there’s some kind of parallel there. There will always be someone else quicker on the ball than me. I’ll let them do the work thanks!

    Reply
  3. Whitney Avatar
    Whitney

    We’re becoming giant lint brushes for information. We can get the latest news in about three seconds online, triage out what’s important, and relegate the not so important to the recesses of our mind.

    Alot of stuff, even unnecessary stuff sticks, and I only have time and attention to dig deeper on the stuff that matters to me. or example, I was sorry to hear of the recent celebrity deaths, but all of the details are largely irrelevant, because dead is dead, regardless of the autopsy results.

    I think people share and talk about stuff to help process it further for themselves- it’s thinking out loud, more than sharing the news itself. And I wish more news that was reported through traditional media sources added some reflection or perspective rather than mere tabloid headlines, because, hey, that’s what twitter is for, right?

    Reply
  4. Christopher Avatar
    Christopher

    I actually experience deja vu when the paper the next day reports something I read about yesterday as if it just happened.

    I’ll be like, “Wait, didn’t this happen already?”
    Sh*t for all I knew there had been a counter-coup in Honduras. Then I remembered I was just reading the paper.

    Papers are history.

    Reply
  5. John Meadows Avatar
    John Meadows

    Getting one’s news solely from Twitter is like just looking at the headlines; it is very difficult to get any context or deeper understanding of events and issues, let alone the ability to discern bias or agendas.

    The Internet is indeed dumbing us down.

    Reply

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