The difference beween reading then (pre-internet) and now. Breadth vs. depth. | Hacker News Reader

The difference beween reading then (pre-internet) and now. Breadth vs. depth.

cogsciresearch.blogspot.com

12 pointsscritic8 comments

My personal opinion is that reading newspaper editorials daily and weekend reading of Economist (what the author calls pre-Internet habit) is more likely to offer analytical depth than browsing tens of blog sites and following up-to-the-minute trends on Twitter. IMHO, Internet has more breadth but less depth... I would want my young kid to follow the newspaper+Economist habit than bothering about hundreds of ever-changing news stories on Twitter and blogs.

Yes. I think the author's perspective was limited to reading Indian dailies, which he says have more breath but less depth. But I remember that before Internet days, there were high-quality weeklies and monthlies, which offered more depth that Internet does today.

It's true that I was limited to reading Indian dailies when I grew up. But I believe the point stands. I think if your job is not in journalism or politics, then you have a limited amount of time left to read. And you can choose either to read magazines, which gives you a sample out of a wide spectrum of topics or you can go into depth on, say, the financial reform bill, and sacrifice "breadth."

You have a point. Although what I had in mind wasn't so much the "real-time" stuff that we get from Twitter and random blogs but the extensive analysis that's often offered on blogs like Brad Delong's, Mark Thoma's Economists View, Savage Minds, or The Monkey Cage. I find RortyBomb to be the single-best coverage of the current machinations over financial reform going on in Congress. Of course, if you follow the financial reform bill extensively, you're going to have to sacrifice reading about, say, the latest news on Israel-Iran relations or the latest on the national political scene in India.

I think that may have been true in the earlier days of the net. The information was there, you just had to take the initiative to look for it.

Nowadays, aggregators (like HN) and websites like Wikipedia have insane amounts of varying knowledge on many topics which are packed tightly together. We often click on that stray link which may lead us to future immersion into a topic or, more commonly, a quick skim of an article.

The result is knowing little about a lot of different things. While the latter graph may still Internet users, the large gaps should be filled instead by many little bars.

That's a very good point - there could be a third graph which has a lot of tiny lines that are far more densely packed together (then the pre-internet graph) but manage to sample the whole spectrum at the same time.

While focusing disproportionately on things like programming/ startups and business, both the other articles that crop up here and going through local news/ following links I think I get a pretty broad knowledge on things. I am still able to go really in to depth on the areas I am most interested though.

Probably could be said that I spend more time reading in this way than I should though, its a fine line between staying on top of everything and putting yourself in a place to get things done.

I agree, it's almost completely a factor of how much time you spend reading and how you manage that time across topics. Increasing the time spent and becoming a better manager probably means you can cover both breadth and depth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com