With the recent boom of websites such as Google News, Newsvine, Boing Boing and many others, it seems that reading the news is 120% more convenient and easier. With direct links to and from, back and forth of different news websites through one site, it really saves the time of having to surf the net of different news sources to get news.
So the question that begs to be answered is, why are these websites becoming so popular? Is it that difficult to surf the net for an extra five minutes to find news? Well the answer is actually quite simple. Simplicity, Convenience, and overall ease seems to be the key. In an April 9th article on Collision Detection, the author uses this example.
<blockquote>When I interviewed Cory Doctorow — cofounder of Boing Boing – for my recent New York magazine feature on blogging, he pointed out an interesting aspect of Boing Boing’s success: Simple, straightforward headlines. </blockquote>
It turns out that people want easy straightfoward news given to them, rather than having to find them. This makes perfect sense. With the development of such websites and RSS feeds, not only do people have to goto a single website for all their news, RSS feeds enables them to sit back and read all their favorite news sites when it is directly sent to them.
Another point the article makes is that people do not want confusing, clever and witty headlines. Why take the time to figure out what the article is about when you can get the very basic summary by reading a straight forward headline? Unfortunately, both ways sound like great ways of gaining readers. A witty clever headline can get the attentions of readers at a single glance, while a straight forward headline takes away the pain of having to figure out the riddle-like headline.
Overall, I guess the direction our internet culture is going for is convenience. Afterall, this makes perfect sense because many technological growth was based solely on making our lives easier.
1) Do you think this only shows how lazy people in our society is getting?
2) The article states that “The human readers of blogs are beginning to behave like bots, too.” Do you agree that people are becoming mindless bots that simply scroll through headlines?
3) With internet news reading becoming a much more mainstream way of communications, have you seen a change in the way people perceive traditional media? If not, do you expect to see any changes in the near future?
May 22, 2007 at 11:20 am
[...] Young [...]
May 22, 2007 at 12:39 pm
I think that it is true that anything that will make our lives easier people will jump all over. Look at all the diets that promise easy ways to loose weight and how popular they are. People like things to be quick and easy that’s the long and short of it I think.
May 22, 2007 at 1:42 pm
I do think that this may be making people lazier. I wonder how the ease of accessiblity to information on the Internet is going to impact the way people view aspects of life outside of the computer screen. It also makes me wonder if we are being robbed of good writing in exchange for simple writing.