Why....I ask.....are science news sites so overwhelming?
Sites like ScienceDaily, Seed, and even Wired offer a plethora of news stories--wait, plethora is the wrong word--these sites offer a overabundance--no--a gargantuan quantity of news stories on their front pages, as if the reader would be comforted by the sheer number of options offered for greedy consumption.
Well, im here to tell you--cross-eyed, overworked editors of online news rags--too many choices are just as enraging as having too few. According to APA online (this seems like a no-duh to me): By the way--someone actually said no-duh to me today. Ha!
"The presumption is, self-determination is a good thing and choice is essential to self-determination," says Barry Schwartz, PhD, a Swarthmore College psychologist and author of "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less" (Ecco, 2004). "But there's a point where all of this choice starts to be not only unproductive, but counterproductive--a source of pain, regret, worry about missed opportunities and unrealistically high expectations."
Where are you on this one--meta science news sites? Don't you read the research news?! Live science kinda gets it--they have a well organized and somewhat curated homepage. But, once you get down to it--SO MUCH NEWS.
In the end, it doesn't matter how many filters or tags or categories you have to whittle your news down to 'what you want to read' (like you always know what THAT is), it is still too much content to handle. Sometimes im lazy and just want to just trust someone to tell me what i want to read or need to read. Other times i want to get really deep into a news site and discover things for myself.
The point is that i want both. Hello!
That's exactly how I feel when shopping for clothes in a department store!!!
ReplyDeleteSeems like people are polar opposites on this...I won't spend 2 seconds on a website if there is too much clutter. I'm constantly organizing bookmarks, iGoogle, and even my iPhone apps so that I don't have too much information or too many choices. Even my to do lists get arranged and re-arranged all the time.
ReplyDeleteI'm interested to see at what point all of these new technologies, programs, etc... are actually counterproductive, as you alluded to.
the reason I commented on this is because of a blog post I read a few weeks ago...it took me a while to find it again, and although it's not specifically related to science websites, it touches on the larger picture of whether endless choices increase or decrease our quality of life, and the way these choices affect our mind.....http://artofmanliness.com/2009/09/20/paradox-of-choice/
ReplyDeleteit's rather simple but a good read.
This is absolutely true. If you read Durkheim's "Suicide" it's all about his statistical analysis of choice=mental destruction. One of his studies was on literacy vs. suicide. His results (which I've never check into how these hold up over time, or fit into the grand scheme of things) but, as I learned it in college, showed that suicide was so much rarer in illiterate people of the time. His whole foundation was about how less choice in many ways = sustainable happiness. (Part of why I'm loving living in Maryville right now, vs. Chicago) ehehehe.
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