I just came across this nice article on content flooding, which is about how the same sort of content “floods” us from all possible sources. All newspapers and news website (not to mention news TV), at any point in time, are “flooding” us with articles about the same thing. This quote from the article possibly makes the point:
Ravi Somaiya wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review last year. In the cacophony of content and conversation around that content, the most familiar voices at the largest, fastest, trendiest outlets carry the farthest; according to SimilarWeb, which tracks website statistics, only five sites dominatearound 50 percent of the share of newspaper traffic in the U.S. CJR also reports that newspapers online, now with a borderless audience, publish more than twice as many stories as they used to, often with a much smaller staff. So what you get are dailies that operate like news channels, dissecting stories (sometimes even original ones) for ratings, which basically means they cover more of less . “Faced with a sea of headlines, in every permutation,” wrote Somaiya, “even the most determined mind rebels and begins to dismiss it all as noise.”
(ed: emphasis added)
Now I don’t intent to reinforce flooding, but I’ve written about this topic before, about how Twitter is like Times Now. However, in the last month or so, when I’ve been mostly off social media, one primary reason why I went off was to avoid flooding. Rather than getting lots of news about the same topic from all sorts of sources I want to learn about a variety of things.
And I’ve tried to tune my media consumption to try and avoid this kind of flooding. I’m off social media now, for there everyone talks about the same topic of the day most of the time. I haven’t watched news TV for some 10-15 years now. I get my article and blog content from RSS feeds (if you have any RSS feeds you think I might like, do share!), and from a bunch of newsletters I’m subscribed to (the article shared at the beginning of this post came from a newsletter by the Guardian).
And by myself being not part of the flooding monoculture (on twitter), I end up writing about stuff that other people may not be writing about at that point in time. And that’s my little contribution to reduce flooding in the world!