We’re all human. We like to stay informed about certain things that are happening in our lives. Whether it be something going on locally around your community or somewhere off in India or England, we as human beings have a thirst for knowledge. With our thirst for knowledge, it’s easy to have access to these different kinds of information that we want to have a hold on, thanks to the Internet. We can access all this information from anywhere in the world that happens to carry a good Wi-Fi signal or bars on your phone. But is it too much to have all this information at our grasps at any given moment of the day?
Bree Nordenson talks about how much information is out there on the Internet in her article “Overload” and sometimes, that isn’t enough to satisfy our need for what we are looking for. We live in a generation that is run by fast technology and larger articles of information that can be useful to our everyday lives. The problem that we have today is the fact that there is just simply too much of it out there, and if it’s all in one place, we put our brains in serious “overload” mode and can’t even begin to function or understand what we are reading off our screens. People soon start to avoid major bits of information that could be useful to them and advertising that can possibly help them out. Mind you, this is advertising that companies pay to be put out on these websites to help increase their sales on their products.
Let’s take for example: you’re on Facebook and you see a link for an article about Justin Bieber. Being slightly curious, you obviously read it to see what it’s about. Then, it starts talking about other things that Justin has done, which leads you to a related article about the other stuff. Soon enough, you’re bouncing all over the Internet, learning more about Justin Bieber’s life and soon enough another celebrity comes along for the research journey. You start to lose interest in what you’ve been reading or your head starts to hurt from all the information you’re trying to sink into your brain. Eventually, you just give up because it’s too much. I don’t know how many times that’s happened to me almost on a daily basis since I’ve came across the Internet.
Nordenson mentions how most news media haven’t grasp the concept of condensing articles to make things simpler and understandable for readers to comprehend, but there are some that do it perfectly well like CNN and the Associated Press among others. With there being so much information about almost every subject and topic in the book, we need to be able to learn these things by reading articles that are a decent length and gives the readers what we came to the article for.
In a recent study during the 2008 election, Nordenson reported that “young adults avoid political news online ‘because they feel too much information is coming at them all at once and too many different things are competing for their attention.'” I am now at the legal age where I can vote in this year’s election but there’s so much information that I can’t seem to think straight, let alone vote who I want to serve as president for the next four years. Teenagers and young adults are known for having such a short term attention span already, so what makes journalists think that we can spend 10-15 minutes reading about candidates when we could play Temple Run or watch the latest episode of Pretty Little Liars or something that seems productive in our eyes. All we ask for is to make articles smaller, simpler and straight to the point. Once that’s done, you’ll have us sold for whatever it is you want us to read….at least for 15 minutes.