Overload

-- January 30, 2011


Sorry about missing yesterday. I was transfixed by the events in Egypt, hoping to make sense out of the news reports, and to compare a variety of coverages.

By the end of the day, I felt as if I'd been watching City Line Drive on cable television -- the ultimate replacement for the old broadcast test pattern. Remember waking up hung over with the test pattern glowing on the little screen, and the feint buzzing of the vaccuum tubes.

By the end of the day, I wasn't sure if Egypt was still ruled by pharaohs. Is this the dreaded information overload? I don't think so. I have precious little information, just random observations that I am free to arrange in any way that suits my mood. Not even Al Jazeera was more convincing than the NYT, or CNN, or Reuters.

In the long run, I think it's a good thing for a society to have all of these sources. But the question is whether we made one of these harder to get, more expensive, would we lose anything by ignoring it. By the end of the day, the NYT news blogger was reporting what CNN was saying. He called the CNN reporters his colleagues, and I suppose that's more or less true. But are we closer to reality that way?