
The difference beween reading then (pre-internet) and now.  Breadth vs. depth. - scritic
http://cogsciresearch.blogspot.com/2010/05/how-we-read-articles-and-magazines-now.html
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beerglass
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.

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greyman
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.

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scritic
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."

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ianbishop
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.

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scritic
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.

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robryan
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.

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scritic
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.

