Increased flow
I grew up consuming media, of one sort; the printed page. Books, magazines, newspapers. All rooted in classic paragraph format. I’m a late comer to the stuff I now watch.
I’ve developed an appetite for capsules. YouTube. Twitter. A lead paragraph from a web page. All highly informative, but presented in non-linear fashion. Of course, I find material that iwant to share with family and friends, particularly the three sons. And invariably, I get back that they’ve “already seen it”.
Perplexing. I have a lot more free time than them. They have jobs! So how are they consistently beating me to the punch line? I gave it some thought, and realized that it’s a question of habit/familiarity. They’ve grown with ONLY capsules of information. The idea of consuming huge tracts of printed matter has never been part of their “information acquisition”. At best, they’ve watched simple half-hour episodes of TV, fractured by ad content. And so, when faced with new information (think about social media), they jump from instance to instance, without hesitation.
Is one model better than the other? No. Is their model better suited to the now? For sure. Realistically, they will never carry home an armload of books from the local library. Instead, the nearest browser on a smartphone or a tablet, will provide more than enough distraction. And since most of us can listen to a greater concentration of visual content than that available from a printed page, they’re going to win the information war. What I needed decades to examine will be reduced to months, maximum. Now, to see what they do with it!
