Is the Easiest Way to Read the News Necessarily the Best?

A brief unscientific history of space, time, news, and information
At the dawn of time, people read the news on thinly-shaved pieces of wood stamped with black ink characters. They were forced by necessity to rummage through pages, use things like indexes, and scan stories they weren't necessarily interested in to get to what they wanted (such as the "funny pages," a term The Ancients used).

Vast eons later, the invention of the radio allowed people to kick back with the sewing and the wood whittling and other ancient unplugged time passers while the news was read to them. Finally, as the Ancient Era broke chaotically into the Olden Days, television came to the fore as the best and easiest medium to receive the news. Indeed, people watched what was usually a well mannered and Midwestern-accented human reading a teleprompter in an effort to convey the important things to know about the world, even when that included the same things over and over again: fire, plane crashes, death, your tax dollars at work, "Could the Next Elevator You Step Into Be Your Last? Stay Tuned For Another Death Trap Report!" and so on.

But now, in the modern era – the Internet era! – we know that the game is different. In fact, eras are now flashing by like a blink in a pan-dimensional vacuum so we're even now zooming our way through a time that is labeled in certain quarters as "Web 2.0."

Web 2.0, or Your Life Is Now Different, and if it isn't different it should be
What does all of this mean for you and me? Choices! Great groaning intensely brain-bending choices of how to access information as it flies at you and desperately seeks to pour its way into every eager human orifice (we're all adults here; we all receive the same spam).

The choices are so many, in fact, that Web 2.0 sites are springing up and stomping on top of one another to decide for us what the best news stories of this very second are. How do they choose for us? Some sites use mysterious conventions involving bizarre notions of algorithms and alchemic electronic abacuses and the like. Other Web 2.0 sites choose for us by letting the collective wisdom (or "wisdom" if you like) of the group decide what the best stories are. This is sometimes known as democratized content.

Article Author: Eric Berlin

Eric Berlin is the publisher of Online Media Cultist. He's also prone to referring to himself in the third person in author bios in an attempt to make it look like someone Less Important wrote it for him.
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