2010.01.24 A Generational Schism

Perhaps one of the strangest realizations I've had in a long time was after recently hearing someone of my parent's generation assert that I might not know something because I don't watch the news.

The not watching the news part is mostly true; there's virtually no network television in my life. And I concede that network news go to a lot of effort to present things that they think people want or (occasionally) ought to know. But they're not for me. They speak to different people than I; I think they're talking to the credulous.

Not just credulous, though, but those preferring a single cohesive source of information that avoids contradiction. And presents them in bite-size bits, one after another, in a digestible stream. That's my theory, at least, as it extrapolates easily into believing that if you sever yourself from the feeding tube of information pabulum that you can't keep current.

But that's obviously not the case. Network TV news isn't the only source of current information, nor even the best source. I wonder if the dedicated viewers of network news ever were subjected to suggestions that they were out of touch by the newspaper-reading advocates whose realm we've all appropriated. Thanks to the intertubes, I have access to a breadth and depth of information that is staggering to contemplate. I'll never be satisfied with a drip-feed of information, and this is the thing that I blithely failed to notice that others don't necessarily recognize. I, and many of my peers, are ravenous infovores.

Which doesn't mean that I don't know something, especially something current. I do have finite attention, after all. It's just that it is probably foolish to assume that network TV news is going to provide important information that I will have missed for any significant duration.

The thing I haven't figured out yet is how to explain this without exposing too much smug superiority.