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-Aidan
On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 9:18 PM, Disqus
of knowledge, Michael -- some kinds of knowledge are obviously worth
seeking out on their own. Are you saying that every article in a
newspaper falls into that category?
In any case, not everyone has the time to seek out knowledge in every
place it might pop up -- why shouldn't they find it however they can?
Isn't that better than not finding it at all?
Yes.
millenials are masters at networking. they are in control of their likes and dislikes in ways we didn't dream of as kids and teenagers. these are people who grew up with "america's funniest videos" and "the real world". Privacy? Voyerism? their definitions are very different from ours.
knowledge, if is important, will get to them because they have networks of people "watching their backs" and taking care of their pipeline.
if you are my age, you became an adult in the 80s, at a time when you had to choose between "networking" to get a job and become a yuppie or saying FU to the man and punking out in one club after another.
trust me. networking, the way they do it, has NOTHING to do with the 'networking', the dirty word i loved to hate in the 80s.
Saying if info is important it'll find me is just like saying when i'm really hungry somebody will appear and give me a sandwich. It can be true if you have some good friends "watching your back", but if it does not happen in time it is deadly, and it is not reliable.
I take it just as a mistake in the sense of the implication. Passing to your network information that you think is important does not mean that you will receive the important information when you need it (the importance being relative to each node of the network). Believing so is just letting your network decide on what sould be important to you. This makes you vulnerable to manipulation.
News is a small group of facts, some of which may have a dubious quality to them, and geared towards relating a particular situation and/or analysis of the event.
Knowledge has more of a perspective of the event which can and usually does, have a greater perspective of the events, theory or accumulated group of facts as they fit into the landscape of the total wholeness.
Networking via people you trust, or will come to trust, is more active than the process of depending upon the process of depending upon the network of televisions and newspaper accounts. For as a participant in a network, the news you receive will only be as reliable as the news you transmit. This becomes a swap meet of information. You have ideas and observations which are not possible by another human being, strictly because you are you and no one else. You transmit these things and receive observations which others have as well.
Important news, such as major catastrophes, governmental declarations, and other such things were quickly passed through the word of mouth channels even before the advent of the internet. However with the development of social networks on the internet, this information travels in real time to a wide variety of people, who then pass it on to other people and therefore the news becomes filtered into its importance.
Importance is not something that has to be known right away. The knowledge of the events on 9/11/2001 is more important than the instantaneous absorption of the event itself. If someone did not know about it for a week or two, their life would not be significantly downgraded, if at all. and perhaps it would have even enhanced their life to not watch it over and over again on the passive networks(television)
you need to qualify this because not everybody as you note, comes through the front page. to paraphrase what zeldman said succinctly in his book, "Designing with Web Standards" : Search engines are not only your biggest audience.
to keep this in mind, it's not the design that one has to think of as in "what does my front page look like", it's the information architecture, especially the implementation of taxonomies, that really makes a difference in creating multiple participation planes and points of entry in a blog.
I said "designed," I meant not just the way they look but also the
structure or the way they work.
it should have said, "Search engines are not only your biggest audience, they're also blind". meaning, that accessibility is a big deal in making all those points of entry happen.
which, btw, is very much how millenials, the subjects of the article, think of. "accessibility" is a big deal : blogs, twitter, myspace, livejournal, facebook, texting, phone, email .... you get the point.
to me, btw, this is not a generational thing since people like you and me share to a certain degree the same networking practices ---but that's why for our generation we're nerds, geeks, outsiders by being in the vangard.
with the millenials, we're talking about a whole generation of you and mes.
and, btw, even within the "digital divide" context the idea holds.
i'm writing a paper about this which is why am soundboarding here ;)
On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 6:59 PM, Disqus
YCombinator's aggregator too, judging by my server logs.
On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 9:39 PM, Disqus
The more important, relevant or impacting a piece of news was, the more likely you would hear about it, and the sooner. Other factors effect it, like, the number and type of a persons contacts, as well as other factors. But otherwise, the essence was as true then as now.
I like to read the news too but I'd admit that most of it is like junk food.
Extremely important and urgent news, like "A large monster is approaching this city. Run for your lives!" will probably reach me right around when I need to know it. Would I like to know it as soon as possible, with as much advanced warning? Sure. That's another issue. But if it's important and relevant to me, it will find me or I will stumble on it. Or... it will stumble on me, as in: "Run for your lives! It's Gojira! Goj--" *squish*
mentioned that in his NYT piece. What is happening (I would argue) is
that it's occurring a lot more, and a lot faster.
On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 10:35 PM, Disqus
Genius.
On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 11:13 PM, Disqus
most kids define it as "what everyone else is talking about"
so, yes, "important" news will "find" you simply BECAUSE everyone else is talking about it
If you want to know about more than what's already on everyone's lips, you have to look for it yourself.
what I described? I'm not saying that newspapers are going to be
obsolete -- just that the way people find the news is changing.
On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 4:10 PM, Disqus
way) keeps that in mind now that he's in charge of NBC News' digital
operations.
On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 5:49 PM, Disqus
http://www.webguild.org/2008/03/important-news-...
Yes, the echo chamber is a real problem, and it's true that people are
often distracted by frivolous "news," but I still think the value of
social networking overcomes that. The friends I rely on to bring me
great links or bring things to my attention are (like me) interested
in a broad and diverse range of things, both deep and shallow, things
that I may not pay attention to -- and I like to think I serve the
same function for others in different ways.
That's what I mean by news finding me.
On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 8:41 PM, Disqus
We should be careful with the assumption that "young people" are immersed in new media and "old geezers" aren't.
I teach citizen journalism at a local university and I'd say less than 10% of them use these things regularly.
Blogs and microblogs are not a generational phenomenon - I think rather that they appeal to a certain personality type.
messaging, IM and Facebook. And at least judging by my own research
using my teenaged daughters, that is how they get a lot of their news.
If news is relevant, it may find me.
The important stuff, I have to seek out.
For example, just today a friend read me a funny passage from CNN.com about couples getting even with each other. It was not important, but it found me.
I still have to actively seek (via RSS subscriptions) what I know is important - political/economic news.
On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 2:16 AM, Disqus
I've treated news as an "it will find me" enterprise for several years now, and while I'm sure I'm less informed than those who really do put the time in to read several newspapers every day, I also seem to get along just fine.
I think that newspapers, along with all other content-based business, are going to need to learn to rely on and enable the community filter to pass their content around. I wrote a post the other day about how the New York Times should take all their really cool interactive graphics and make them embeddable widgets the way youtube made video embeddable.
It's a little sad, because I think there's real value in having an editorial board come together at 5pm and decide what the public most needs to know (putting a limiter, essentially, on the public's sweet tooth for celebrity or sports news).
But the fact of the matter is that most people don't WANT those editors to be their filter anymore, and the tools are available for people to do otherwise. So adapt to that system, or lose out.
@wesleyverhoeve thats us though. "if the news is important, it will find me" may be more common. hell, i can relate too [link to post]
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@rafikam true, i sometimes forget what bubble i am in, even just as a new yorker
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