How much content can we…sorry what I was saying?

Maybe I’ve noticed this recently because I’ve just started using an iphone, but the amount of content that surrounds us and how much we’re able to consume, is staggering. Apparently I don’t get bored in queues anymore, because I can check my email or read the news. We are now active across so many channels and subject to so many different forms of content that I’m starting to wonder if there’s a limit to how much content we can take before it becomes just meaningless noise ; when the definition of ‘reading an article’ becomes reading the excerpt on the blog. It may be the case that I’m a particularly bad example of being continually distracted, but I’m finding it increasingly hard to consume one piece of content for any considerable length of time.

Let me just give you one example to put this into perspective. Please bear with me, it’s worth reading. On Monday I went to my Twitter feed to read the latest updates (the first type of content) then stumbled across a link to a very interesting article by Paul Carr. I got a few paragraphs in and tweeted what a good article it was.

Then whilst I was there I scrolled through Twitter some more, sent a DM to someone and returned to the article. A couple more paragraphs in and although I was fascinated, I actually scrolled down to see if it was too long , before deciding it was just about okay for me to handle. I then wondered if it had been submitted to Digg so I went there and read through some more headlines before going back. The article itself referenced a video on youtube that the author wasn’t able to embed so I went to youtube and remembered another video I hadn’t seen so I searched for that. By which point I was completely lost and luckily only found my way back to the article some time later because I had left it open on a tab. I would draw a diagram to demonstrate this, but I wouldn’t know where to start and it would probably look something like this :

The example above hopefully not only shows that we are subject to a ridiculously large amount of content online, but that we’re not really consuming it anyway. Like I said, I might be a particularly bad case but I know I’m not an isolated one. I wonder if we’re literally about to reach the point of information-overload. Where nobody really consumes anything anymore, yet we consider ourselves well-versed because we can reel off the latest post titles from Techcrunch. I used to love reading books, but now, not only do I find it hard to sit down and read one, I’ve currently got four on the go. Somehow I’ve attempted to translate my online consumption of content into offline and it doesn’t quite fit.

The concept of ‘noise’ is something that needs attention. As consumers we’re developing our own rules and habits fast that allow us to more easily streamline content. We subscribe to publisher’s twitter feeds so we can consume the news in 140 characters, we filter out hashtags on tweetdeck to avoid being bombarded with conference updates – all these little habits that we don’t even notice we’re developing, so we can become more efficient consumers of content. Someone even said to me a couple of months ago ‘yeah you do have to read a lot, but don’t bother reading the comments. They’re useless and take too much time anyway’. Whether you judge them or not, that was their method of streamlining information that they felt necessary to develop due to the pressure of having to know everything in their particular industry.

Now, sites are aware of our need to consume quality content faster and are developing ways to help us. Somewhat quietly, Twitter announced last week that they were making small changes to the way the trending topics worked. They are committed to helping their users find more relevant trending tweets, filtering out a lot of the spam and noise. They haven’t released too many details about what exactly this will involve (it will only be released to a small number of users first) but it will eventually return the most relevant tweets at the top of a trending topic. This will hopefully add some sense to some of the more bizarre trends on Twitter and will help us get to the information that actually explains the trend a lot quicker. it’s not clear yet if this is going to be automated, which raises an interesting issue of who at Twitter would get to decide which tweets are relevant. Not a job title I’d like to defend.

The need for rapid consumption of content is also being addressed by The New York Times, who are due to announce the launch of their new online news reader. (There is a test site here where you can see the new application, but it seems to be down a lot of the time.) Only, in a true reflection of how we consume content, it’s not going to be a reader. No, one of the working titles is the ‘article skimmer’. See? We don’t even read anymore, we skim. The specific aim of the project is interesting itself. It has been designed to replicate the experience of a newspaper spread out on a table, specifically so we can consume as much content as possible. At least, according to The NY Times, as much as will fit onto your computer screen.

I’ve no doubt that a concept like the article skimmer will become widely popular. But is it essentially just presenting us with more content that we’re going to ambiently consume? When we’re only one tempting click away from a myriad of other topics and headlines that we can’t wait to consume, is there even a need for journalists to write more than 2 paragraphs of a story?  I’d like to think there is, but I’m not so sure that this is the way we’re heading. The concept of ‘continuous partial attention‘ is well worth reading up on. It seems that the jury’s still out on this one and I myself have yet to decide if I can really give up fast consumption of a lot of the facts, for slower consumption of the detail.

Also, I will send an Amazon gift voucher to all the readers of this post…. nah not really, just checking you were still here

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