Important News Will Not Find You

If the news is important, will it find you?

Two normally insightful web watchers - Matt Ingram who writes for the Toronto Globe and Mail and his own techology blog, and Mark Cuban who writes for the heck of it after making a billion or so during web bubble number one - suggest that the news will find them.

They are wrong, and this line of thought is both foolish and dangerous.

The notion is that in our globally networked and highly interconnected 24/7 information environment important items won't just drop off of the radar - rather these "need to know" news items will find their way to a reasonably alert person via emailings from friends, twitters or Facebook contacts, blog aggregation, or other methods. Matt and Mark think that just because they have broadband to the house and they've got some good social networking going on they are protected from ignorance. But they are not.

As much as we should appreciate the power the internet brings to the information table, it is imperative now more than ever that we identify the limits of that power. It would take a novel to illustrate all the examples of how our new information environment can distort and misdirect our short attention spans to the wrong stuff, but the ADD version of the story is that while the internet does a good job of helping us find specific information once we take the time to research a topic, the internet also leads to some very undesirable conditions with respect to news:

One challenge is the echo chamber effect. Aggregation sites like Google News, Technorati and TechMeme use various algorithms to determine how much "buzz" a news story has. This in turn lifts the most relevant sites on the topic to the top of the heap, which in turn creates stories based on that initial buzz. This feedback loop tends to create an over-examination of the buzz topic and ignore deeper, more complex issues that are hard to write about.

Another far more important challenge is our human and social tendency to interact with trivial but interesting news rather than heavy, important news. You can only view so much material per day, and if your social network is buzzing about the latest gadget or latest scandal you are more likely to encounter that news than an item about the ongoing genocide in Darfur, or the fact that expanding malaria programs and advances in oral rehydration therapy in the third world could save several thousand children per day. The latter are significant and changing items that only rarely make the news cut.

Our interest in the trivial over the substantive creates a commercial challenge as well. Most online news now has a very strong commercial component and people are more likely to bring pageviews to Britney Spears head shaving incident than a report on the effectiveness of famine relief programs in Africa. I'm not blaming the internet for our ignorance, but I'm not going to credit it with bringing us much enlightenment either.

My point is that simply having our new and massive information gathering capability by no means guarantees we'll have the wisdom to pay attention to what really matters.

The internet has not let us off the hook by any means.

Important news will not find you.