All Wired Up

I read Stephen’s article on and off over a period two weeks. It took me this long because I had trouble concentrating enough to do it all in one session. A sign, I suppose, of my ever-dwindling ability to focus on small black text on white-space. According to Quinn, I’m not the only one…

My generation, the dreaded Gen-Y, are constantly accused of ‘wanting it all and wanting it now’. In a soulless rush for instant gratification, we shun literature, academic texts, newspapers, even road signs. Hell, anything that takes more than 30 seconds of concentration just isn’t on our radar. We don’t even have respect for the English language. Instead, we replace it with ‘txtspeak’. It saves valuable time when we’re breaking our thumbs trying to txt frantic msgs 2 our m8s u c?

In all seriousness though, now more than ever, time is money. I don’t know about anyone else, but I just can’t imagine having the luxury of sitting down and reading my favourite newspaper everyday. In fact, when I think about it, I hate newspapers, in the traditional paper format anyway.

Here’s how I get my news on a normal working day:

I shoot a quick glance at the headline of someone else’s newspaper on the train.

I get to work, bring up Google News and see what interest me. The best thing about Google is that I can see what’s happening and then choose which newspaper’s version I want to read. I’m not confined to just one paper’s version.

If I’ve got the time, I prefer to read features rather than front-page news, so i pop on over to Arts and Letters Daily. A&L conveniently source all the worthy features from newspapers all around the globe and put them all together so I can point-and-click as I choose.

After that I check my RSS feed from Metacritic which does a smiliar thing as A&L -gathering music, film, video game and TV reviews from media all over the globe and bringing them together on the one page.

Astute readers will notice a pattern here. I like my news and information condensed, or i guess you could say ‘converged’. I don’t necessarily read less than the broadsheet-brethren, I just want my information presented to me in an easily digestible format that I can customise to suit my needs.

Basically, I don’t want to read my news in a format that requires arms the size of Mr Tickle to read.

Mr Tickle: Avid reader of The Age

~ by alchemi on August 10, 2008. Tagged: broadsheet, convergence, journalism, mr tickle, multimedia, news, newspaper, online, rss, the age