Nom, nom, nom: Gorging on junk-food media
If I told you I’d simultaneously scarfed down pizza, corndogs, Oreos and French fries, nibbling for seconds on one, then the other, then back and forth, in a sloppy hurry, you might worry about my arteries or my sanity or both. At a minimum, you’d be grossed out. It sounds unhealthy and nasty. I mean, ewww, who eats like that?
But that’s exactly how we consume information on the Web. We gorge on a media diet void of nutrition, unmemorable, half-eaten.
Oh, pardon me? You’d like us to savor a bite of sophisticated or intellectual fare. Nope, no thank you. I doubt life would be much improved by reading print copies of The New York Times, the steamed broccoli of journalism. We relish an overflowing plate of the Internet equivalent to a junk food smorgasbord, a veritable poo-poo platter of Bored Pandas, YouTubes and Tastefully Offensives. Even at work, when our menus include meatier news-food, we always have a couple of YouTube windows open, dipping into them regularly. So don’t even roll your eyes or waggle your finger, ‘cause we obviously don’t care.
We don’t care if the media meal upon which we dine is giving us the equivalent of mind diabetes or psychological heart disease. So what if these media morsels filled with their empty calories transform their way into the inner workings of our thoughts like real food transforms itself into our brick and mortar bones and flesh? We hunger for a life of one eye on the TV and the other on the laptop — while texting.
And don’t expect us to slow down and read one thing at a time. We want to skim and scan and dart back and forth between dozens of tabs. It’s 2015, and the media buffet is a grazer’s chaos, a super-sized slosh bucket of content, an offering so vast that diners must sift through the table scraps to taste a savory morsel.
That’s because there are practically as many chefs in the kitchen as there are diners at the banquet, churning out more fodder every second. We concoct and upload our stews, then count our clicks and our page views. Eyes scanning, neurons darting, we’ve ingested Web metrics just like we’ve ingested everything on the Web, shallowly skimming the surface. Attention metrics are the hottest new craving. We yearn to know which of our readers merely sniffs around our dishes and which fully digests them. But can we?
Can one ever know, Web or no Web, the impact of her products on another? For excellence and recognition have always been decoupled. (Think Van Gogh) The Internet of today is not so different from older forms of communication in that sometimes a reader identifies with an author and a bond between them forms. The best we can strive for is to look inside ourselves to find what has truth, meaning and authenticity — to serve that up, and trust that our audience is not so different from ourselves.
Okay, time to guzzle another cat video.
