Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [26]
Some guidelines for tryouts:
Be discerning about which sources to try out. The process takes time, so if you’re confident that a source won’t generate value, don’t bother to try it.
Be intentional: Know what you’re trying out and why, and for how long you’ll try it out. For a print publication, for example, I can generally tell within one issue what the viewpoint is, what the scope of information is, and whether it’s worth adding to the media diet. Some sources may require trying out for two or three publishing cycles.
Remember that the team can only be so big. Every addition to the lineup costs more of your precious resource of time, so you must be biased toward rejecting tryouts. And when you do move a tryout to the lineup, consider whether you can then remove one of the existing sources, so that the entire lineup stays around the same size.
It’s also healthy to occasionally try an unusual or out-of-the-way publication, TV show, or radio show, as a one-off. You’re not trying out the source for your permanent lineup; you’re just reading, watching, or listening to it once to be open to a serendipitous encounter with an idea, trend, or person you wouldn’t find in your normal sphere. If it ends up being good enough to add to your lineup, so much the better.
Maintenance
Maintaining a healthy media diet requires vigilance about what you’re consuming. Thus it’s important to constantly ask the question, “Is this worth my time?” at every level: the source (“Is this source worth my time?”), a particular issue of the source, an article, even down to the paragraph or section of an article you’re in. If the answer is “no” to any of these, skip it. Move to the next article, or trash the entire issue; and if it happens too often with one source, consider removing it from the lineup altogether.
A balanced food diet draws proportionally on the various food groups; likewise, a healthy media diet draws on different kinds of sources. One good print news magazine can supply many of the basic nutrients, week after week, for keeping the user informed. Other sources, like trade publications, can fill the need for a specific view of the world. Even a tabloid—the nutrition-free, puffed-air-and-sugar confection of the media world—can occasionally be OK. The key, as always, is to limit the lineup to the smallest set of sources that keep you healthy and energized for the work you have to do. This means not consuming everything that comes your way.
Online media sources can present a special challenge because of the inconceivable number of choices. The Internet contains the biggest selection of media in history: millions of blogs, podcasts, videos, photo sets, and other sources. Techies often subscribe to a collection of such feeds with a tool called an “RSS reader,” which allows them easy and instant access to dozens or hundreds of online sources. But the sheer amount of choice can be paralyzing. As one highly regarded blogger put it (on his blog, of course):
I’ve collected so many RSS feeds that, when I sit down in front of the [RSS reader], it’s almost as difficult a challenge as having no feed reader whatsoever. With dozens and dozens of subscriptions, each filled with dozens of unread posts, I often don’t even know where to start.13
The explosion of online sources led me, a few years back, to propose “Hurst’s Law”: An unbounded bitstream tends toward irrelevance. (This devaluation of bits is apparent not just in the media diet but in other areas of bit literacy, and it will appear again in later chapters.)
There are valuable sources online, but bit-literate users have to be careful not to snack on lots of blogs “just because they’re there.” Ease of access does not imply value, and it’s easy to waste time this way. Instead, users should apply the same tryout process on online sources as they would for any offline source. One