Digital Diet: Just Say No to Papyrus

We in the Transitional Generation still find ourselves rummaging through piles of delivered newsprint, while toggling among laptops, desktops, Palms and iPods through often-extended workdays. But we know that the present won't hold; we're just comfortable as a sandwich information generation. Other humans, mainly the age-impaired, are clearly weening themselves off papyrus, which was clearly a transitional technology of its own.

Then there's the cold turkey approach. That's what Amy Webb undertook. Founder and editor of Dragonfire, a digital, multimedia mag out of Philly, Webb stopped reading print, listening to radio and watching TV. For 30 days. Kind of like Morgan Spurlock, without the massive cholesterol intake.

She consumed -- about 14 hours of day -- news and info from her computers only. Of course, much of what she took in originated at newspapers and broadcasters, but she ate it all online. Bloglines served as a home base, but she ventured out from there. She wandered across unexpected jewels, BBC reports and items from Greensboro, N.C.

Amy (right) missed the comfort, the sheer usability of the print newspaper at times like Sunday morning in bed.

Interesting, she found local information the hardest to get at:

Day 5: Tuesday, June 6

How to stay on top of local events? Do I need to check all the local news Web sites every day? I try a different tack: I subscribe to various RSS feeds from NBC10.com (http://www.nbc10.com). The feeds, oddly enough, come mainly from a national office and not from Philadelphia. I also add the WPVI-TV 6 site (http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/), the KYW NewsRadio 1060 site (http://www.kyw1060.com), and what I can find on Philly.com. For some reason, the RSS service isn't working today on WHYY (www.whyy.org/). (To be fair, if you checked today, you'd probably find dozens of RSS feeds available on local news from local Web sites - but still, it's clear that our local venues have some catching up to do where Web technology is concerned.)

As of 9:23 a.m., here's all I know about Philadelphia: (1) police are looking for a deliveryman missing on the Schuylkill Expressway; (2) a New Jersey woman, Erica Tonsberg of Collingswood, made Stuff magazine's 101 Sexiest Women online; (3) the Newtown Theater has refused to show the film United 93.

It's clear that I can rely on RSS for national news, but the local media haven't caught up on the technology yet.

Very polite of her to say it that way. 10 years into the Internet, newspapers online look much too much like newspaper in print. And are working their way into obsolescence. Amy found that by turning to local blogs and podcasts....and found that her local information quotient rose appreciably.

What's it take to pull off the experiment, to replace a paper. Here's her equipment list:

Equipment

• Fifteen-inch PowerBook G4 (Mac).

• G5 with 20-inch cinema display (Mac).

• BlackBerry.

• iPod (30 gigabytes of memory).

• Wi-Fi sniffer (to find open wireless networks).

• DSL connection at home.

• T-1 connection at the office.

A short list, and one that's becoming quite common in many Americans' lives.

Check out her experiment, either with the Op-Ed she wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer or by listening to her "Talk of the Nation" interview yesterday.

The experiment of course obscures the fact that what's endangered here is the resources to produce the reporting and writing that are journalism  -- whether consumed traditionally or online. Webb knows that, and yet her clarity about the meaning of her experiment is clear:

...the way we gather and distribute information will increasingly rely on digital technologies. Teenagers don't know a world without computers, so they've been socialized to accept rapid human-machine interactions. For the rest of us, the transition won't be easy. But it is inevitable

 

 

 

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Copyright 2006 Content Bridges

Comments

[L. Sider]

Just out of curiosity... what would the dollar value of your short list of equipment needed to replace that two dollar paper come to.

L.Sider

[John Blossom]

Ken,

Good take, though I think that the real picture of why local news is not happening online in a very consumable manner has additional angles to consider. My take is at ContentBlogger.

All the best,
John Blossom