RSS feeding our egos?
Matthew Yoemans in a lecture he gave discussed three new ‘powers’ that online news have over offline news. The third was: “The power to choose.” On the internet people can now choose what news they want to read, when they want to read it and how. This new concept is driven in part by RSS feeds. I will let this video explain exactly what an RSS feed is because it can do it so much better than me:
Most newspaper or magazine websites now use RSS feeds so that readers can simply take what they want from the stories that day. The Telegraph has a vast 55 feeds altogether ranging from ‘top news’, to ‘gardening’, to ‘Chelsea‘ depending on your interest. Any feeds I subcsribe to can then be collated in a feed reader like Googlereader. Aggregators aggregated altogether…could life be easier?
Feeds are becoming ever more focused towards a readers needs to the extent that someone can now design and manage their own feeds using tools like Yahoo Pipes or Feed Rinse (check out this article praising the powers of Feed Rinse). They allow you to aggregate and filter web feeds, web pages and other services to match your exact needs. I can chisel down my already chisselled down information into the very shape I want.
The weird and wonderful world of Yahoo Pipes
RSS feeds mean that we no longer have to sift through an entire newspaper to find one story – the story comes to us. Yet as we celebrate this new age – the age where the power lies with the reader – we are reminded of how things used to be. We are told about the days when egotistical journalists felt that they knew best and would choose what news was worthy. Yet, I wonder if this relationship has not simply swung the other way? Narcissistic journalists have become narcissistic readers.
If you ask someone if they read the news and they reply ‘no’ then you might perhaps consider them ‘ignorant’ of the world’s events. If you ask someone if they read the news and they reply ‘only what I want to read’ would you still consider them ignorant?
With RSS feeds that can be tailored more and more tightly to a person’s interests there is the danger that his or her view of the world may become skewed. Do RSS feeds encourage us to see the world from only our own viewpoint? Someone who subscribes to only economic news feeds might have let the recent human rights crisis in Congo pass them by. In extreme cases those who already have narrow points of view may simply be able to reinforce these by ignoring the news they do not wish to hear.
Aleks Krotoski in her Guardian blog discusses the concept of virtual worlds – a place where everything is personalised and tailored to the user’s wants. For example, in an online world you can immediately identify those with the same interests and then interact with them. Yet she claims, “It’s at once exciting and sinister: more common ground from the get-go means getting down to business more quickly, but the fine art of small talk becomes obsolete, as well as its welcome offshoot, discovering something new”. Her point is clearly relevant to the age of RSS feeds. Are we giving up the process of discovery?
I am, however, never one to blame the tool. I am simply discussing the pros and cons. How a tool is used is always down to the individual and whilst feeds may help some readers ignore certain news they help others engage with news like never before offering a quick and easy service. In many ways RSS feeds also mean that a lot of news which may normally be ignored is now pushed to the forefront. For example charity websites which may have found it hard to project news specific to their field into the public domain can now use RSS feeds doing just that on their front pages.
The aggregator is certainly not going to go anywhere either – the RSS feed has become, in a short time, an integral part of online news and it’s what the reader wants and what the reader wants they are going to get. That’s just how it goes online.
Glyn Mottershead said,
November 10, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Good points about aggregators – but surely that is like saying we don’t want to know the news as we read the Daily Mail ;D
We’ve always selected our sources of news. Mail, Telegraph or Sun? Men’s Health or .net magazine? BBC evening news, or regional ITV?
Each of these has their own take, we can be informed without watching them all – but a diehard of each would take issue with not consuming the rest.
As to your point about the Congo, why do you think Bob Geldof and the gang started LiveAid – because no one was paying attention.
Yes it is possible that RSS will lead to a focus on an individual’s news consumption, but to be honest I don’t think you’ll find that has changed all that much.