Watching Obama and McCain duke it out for this dubious prize will be millions of ordinary people from all over the world. Most will keep abreast of the action through the traditional medium of a T.V. news channel.
In doing so however, are people narrowing their perspective of events? The answer is probably yes (particularly if they’ve decided to watch a certain U.S. news channel owned by a certain antipodean media oligarch).
Consumer choice is a big issue these days, and nowhere is that more apparent than on the Internet. Not content with the seemingly infinite repository of information that is Google, people can now cut out the “middle man” of searching for information altogether.
Welcome to the world of RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication), a device that enables people to have the information they’re after (such as election result updates) sent directly to their home pages.
This way it’s possible to collate multiple sources of information from all over the web in one convenient place, broadening perspective and making life that much easier.
RSS was the brainchild of Netscape employee Ramanathan V. Guha, who back in the late 1990s began working on a system to distribute news and information online. Fast forward to 2008 and with the latest versions of RSS, internet users have a highly effective tool for sifting the morasses of digital information, and keeping upto date with the latest developments.
Furthermore, specific feeds mean that users can select precisely what content they want to be kept informed of, be it market data or football scores. With my Netvibes page I certainly appear to have a pretty sweet set-up, but one question persists in nagging me: by streamlining and tailoring my news updates to specific fields, am I inadvertently blinkering my information consumption? It would certainly account for my consistent inability to recall the Bank of England base lending rate in David’s news quizes.
From this standpoint then, one could take a decidedly critical view of RSS. Yes it facilitates convenience but it also arguably breeds ignorance. We as journalists need to think very carefully about the so-called “social media” feted by some as the saviour of the profession. We’d do well remembering that sometimes the most important news can be that which we least want to hear.
