If Everything, Then Nothing

When blogging first took off in the early 2000s, one of the best things about it was the ability to get hyper specific. Blogs and forums sprung up on the most arcane and fascinating topics possible. It was an expansion perhaps of the early AOL channels that enabled people to quickly zero in on the interests that they wanted to explore online.

The online experience has diversified and nearly every site has become a catchall regardless of its original intent. While there are drill downs, channels and hashtags, the experience overall is always one of sorting and finding. Exploration online now has the numbing quality of flipping through channels via remote control on a television (an activity in decline).

The logic makes sense. In the beginning, people viewed very few websites. Then they viewed many websites in the course of a day, often using RSS feeders to keep up. I’m one of the last dinosaurs to still keep track of the web in that way and I’m finding more and more newly designed sites lack the functionality to have fresh content delivered via RSS. Instead people visit a few sites and they are mostly social or news aggregators.

The internet is still a place to explore the most random and obscure of interests but the way we experience them is more likely to be through a Facebook or Reddit group, an instagram hashtag or perhaps (less frequently) encountered randomly on a google search. We land sometimes in these little islands of curiosities still tucked into the corners of the web.

We get what I like to call browser blind. We see so many things in an average day that what imprints on the brain is more likely to be an amalgamation of things rather than the deep experience of connecting with either a personality or an interest.

Lately it seems that we share our lives more than our knowledge. We photograph and video our lives and share them on Snapchat and Instagram but what we share less often is our deep wisdom, our proficiency, our expertise.

As I get older, I find the urge to deepen my focus and narrow my range. Perhaps this is a natural impulse to cede the floor but I suspect it’s also brain-led. When I taught beat-centered reporting at UCI Extension I did so because I truly and deeply believe that beat-centered reporters do better work than generalists. We apply the tools to the vertical, not the other way around.