I Tried to Read a Newspaper on the Bus. It was aweful.
Last thursday, our course intructor asked us to bring newspapers to our seminar. It was the first time in a couple of weeks for me to use an actual, printed newspaper (magazines not included). During the session, I remembered my grandfather, amongst others, complaining about today’s smartphone generation, always looking down on tiny screens, not socializing or even being aware of their environment. And I remembered the answer I always used to comments like these (which i actually also used when commenting one of the earlier posts here): Using your smartphone is not worse than reading newspaper in public.
So I decided to do an experiment. I already had the newspaper, so I just needed a bus. Because of the fear of being recognized, I decided to do my experiment not in Mainz, but in a secret location.
There I stood, at the bus stop, armed with the Südhessen Morgen. There were quite some people around me, so I began reading the title page. The articles were not that interesting, so I just scanned the headlines and then moved on to unfold the newspaper. I now had a piece of paper in front of me, 69.5 cm in width and 51.3 cm in heigth, making it impossible to see the people, the road, the bus, everything. I continued scanning the headlines when I heared the bus coming. Trying to fold my newspaper back together in order to board the bus, one of the topic parts fell out. While trying to catch it, I crumbled the whole newspaper, now looking more like waste. I boarded the bus and got a window seat. A mid-aged woman sat next to me. As soon as the bus started moving, I unfolded my newspaper, only to find that all the pages got mixed up during the rescue of that one topic. I continued reading with the unfolded newspaper until the woman next to me kindly asked me to put my hand and my paper away from her. Only then did I realize that I used both my space and hers as well. I apologized and folded the newspaper over to reduce its width. That worked great, until I had to turn the page. This resulted in me crumbling the paper even more and completely losing control over it, with several pages falling down and me quitting the experiment. Being totally frustrated, I tried to remember what I had read in the newspaper. I had skipped most of the local news, the sports news, the car news, basically 80% of the newspaper’s content was not interesting. The few interesting-sounding articles were too long to read in an annoying environment like the one that I had caused. The 1,80€ that I spent on the newspaper were a complete waste of money, as only about 20% of the content was of any interest.
Long story short, what was the outcome of my experiment? I was wrong. I told everybody that reading newspaper in public is just as bad as looking at your smartphone screen, when actually reading newspaper is way, way worse. The annoying sounds and the space you need to turn the page as well as the blocked view in all directions make newspapers not only an anti-social, but fairly dangerous device. And while it may be suited for your breakfast table, it should be banned from public transport. Had I used a tablet to read the news (which I usually do), it would have been a much smoother ride. And I would have saved 1,80€, which, when saved everyday for half a year, results in 320€, enough to buy an LTE enabled tablet PC for mobile news whenever I need them and, more importantly, exaclty the ones I want to read.
