Look at your browser window. How many tabs do you have open right now? I tend to average between 10 and 20, the tabs condensing until they are identical gray slivers pressed against each other, untitled and indistinguishable from one another. The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, Facebook, stray articles from various news sites — they are all rendered one and the same as on the round-edged Google Chrome template, despite varying in content. The Internet has become an overwhelming funnel of information: even if you only consider “legitimate” news publications, there are still over 1,000 news articles published every day, all awaiting Internet acknowledgment like a solitary grandmother seeking eye contact in the nursing home, eager to show off pictures of her grandchildren.
There is a considerable amount of crap produced in the publish-or-perish hyperactive anxiety of online journalism, that humming gerbil wheel of digital production. This absence of time online allows for the pervasiveness of the nerve-wracking “in case you missed it” or ICYMI section, where articles from past days or weeks are featured. This acronym stands as a specter of all the information you didn’t consume, the Frostian digital road(s) not taken. ICYMI is the nail in the coffin of news as we knew it: a cycle of stories that were once contingent on linear time, temporal happenstance and a limited medium. ICYMI represents the information wormhole into which news has been consumed and made redundant, for nothing is “new” for more than a millisecond, and anything past that is neither old nor new — it is eternally present.
Without a sense of old or new there can be no news. Online journalism as a profit-making enterprise — that is, one that can consistently attract attention and readership — is dying. People don’t care enough to read beyond the headlines, because why waste time delving into one piece of news when there is a plethora of others that equally merit your attention? You will never be up to date as to what occurs in your digital neighborhood — read: the world — as, in the words of one Atlantic reporter, “there is always something more.”
In an ICYMI world without space or time, the pieces that should draw attention are those with the capability to amuse or inspire, those that can become quintessential and timeless in a time-less realm. Long-form, ponderous journalism — The Atlantic, say (though even that gets crowded sometimes), niche humor sites like McSweeney’s and The Toast: these are the ones that flourish in an era of infinite retrievable research and the potential for connection and cross-media collaboration. Read quickly to become informed, but pay attention to the reads that require digestion, ones that open like a slow yawn on a summer day and leave you grinning, thinking, satisfied.
We are entering a time when competition and the sheer volume of what needs to be produced every day — regardless of whether there are ideas of note to be relayed and expressed — is dramatically reducing the quality of writing across all journalistic media and creating a host of redundant and repetitive fodder. Don’t consume indiscriminately — read things that will last, that linger with you. Skim your online paper, sure — but then crack open a book. Peruse an intelligent webcomic. Watch a Vice documentary. The Internet may be slowly closing the door on conventional online journalism, but it is introducing manifold opportunities for looking up and pursuing creative means of expressing information and ideas.
Eschew the notion that you need to cling to the online newspaper in order to be “aware”: no one is aware. Everyone is aware. Be awake, instead, to artistry and new frontiers for the reconfiguration and expression of information.
Tamar Ziff is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at t.ziff@cavalierdaily.com.
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