Thursday, September 12, 2013

The Future of Reading and Where I Get My News

Where do Millenials, Generation Y, my generation, get our news? Or rather is reading dying the same way that print books and newspapers are fading? Not so old people! We do read, but our reading is clearly different than yours. It will happen in shorter bursts better measured in seconds and minutes rather than hours. Does that mean it is more shallow than the hours long wading through texts previous generations endured? Perhaps, in fact, unfortunately, it is quite likely that our reading and communicating skills are lower than previous generations. Lest we willfully burn books let me tell you about my daily information and news accumulation. 

In typical order during the day:
- Check Stock futures of S&P and maybe Apple
- NPR - make a playlist of 10-20 radio segments to listen to while I do simple tasks at work
- Stock market openings - see how much money I am losing today
- Runners World/Running Times Racing News at lunch - see what the professionals are doing and the scientists are saying
- MacRumors - a bit of a proxy for all tech news, specifically Apple related
- AllAfrica.com - maybe read one article about war, poverty or education
- Explorers Web - Who's pushing the limit today?
- NASA Mars Currosity - worst media site I check but interesting when they do actually update it once every three weeks
- Stock closings - how much money I lost today and read a couple articles about companies I own
- WSJ - iphone app free articles and watch videos as I eat supper
- NYTimes - typically read my three free articles and maybe watch some videos, although they are rarely news related like WSJ
- Twitter - see if anything is happening
- Internet search whatever is on my mind such as tiny houses, marathon training or general economic conditions

The point being, there are volumes of information at our fingertips. Instead of reading a 300 page book about one subject we read 600 tweets and posts and videos about 80 different topics. 

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.