Iterations

A few days ago I posted for the first time on the blog of perhaps my favorite science fiction writer, L. E. Modesitt, Jr.  (It’s either him or C. J. Cherryh, I go back and forth.)  Mr. Modesitt had posted about an Economist study about the effects of the Internet on social relationships, and the thread got my Gen-Y-apologist knee jerking.

I started by pontificating, “First, not reading tripe (i.e. most newspapers) could be evidence of sanity on the part of the populace rather than the opposite. Even could I abolish sleep, I only have 168 hours a week to work with; whyever should I spend it on what passes for newspaper reporting today?”  And then went into a way-too-extended discussion of Tocqueville on American associationalism.

But it got me thinking about the reading of newspapers.  (Modesitt is a favorite author because he always makes me think!)  After all, despite my comment about “tripe”, I do subscribe to a daily newspaper.  So why do I subscribe?  What do I read?

Today’s Gazette — formerly known as the Cedar Rapids Gazette, the paper now bills itself as “An Independent Newspaper in Iowa’s Technology Corridor” — is in three sections.

Section A — state news mostly, plus editorials, weather and obits.  The section takes just seconds to scan.  I read about four paragraphs about our idiot governor’s idea to run a passenger train from Iowa City to Chicago — a train that would travel at a leisurely 79mph and take 5 hours (assuming Amtrak went against its usual practice and ran on time).  Obits — well, I’m getting old enough that i check these periodically, a tiny bit of evidence that social relationships still matter. Glance at weather — more thunderstorms.  Lovely: my neighbors and I have been helping each other out all weekend after Friday brought not one, but two, hailstorms with quarter-sized hail.  (Actually baseball-sized a few miles southeast of here.  Yech.)  The rest of the section — scanned headlines and done in under a minute.

Section B — sports, national/world news.  When younger I would have spent some time on sports pages — now, the only thing I notice is that last weekend was the British Senior Open and that I’d never heard of the golfer who won it.  The national/world news — under a minute, and that was a waste of time.

Section C:  “Accent”, comics, classifieds.  Haven’t read comics in years.  Classifieds I rarely look at, but I looked at them today — looks like a pretty healthy section, actually — lots of social interaction there.  Though I suppose it doesn’t count since its the social coordination of markets at their best.  (Craigslist, E-bay — all they do is drive us apart, say many know-everything critics.)

And “Accent”.  Well, I suppose it used to be called “human interest” or some such.   Most of the stories today are about health.  One about 72 year-old yoga practitioner.   The rest — basically articles about scientific studies, health risks, what the smarties think us dumbshits should be doing.  Funny thing, isn’t it, the section of the newspaper that one might imagine celebrating social relationships, building them, encouraging them, is doing very little.  There’s a single editorial  about a dad re-uniting with his sons after 3 decades.

Counting writing this blog, I’ve spent about an hour with today’s paper.  I expect that if I had spent an hour randomly surfing the internet I would have seen more, not less, evidence of social relationships being built/developed/strengthened.

How about you, Iterations readers?  How much time do you spend with newspapers?  And what do you spend it on?

Me, tomorrow I expect I’ll be back to “15 minutes or less”.  And to wondering why I keep the subscription.

(p.s. If you want to check out Mr. Modesitt, there’s a link to his website in the blogroll at right. In my opinion, he has a better understanding of economics than just about any science fiction writer out there, even those whom I’m more ideologically simpatico with.)

This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 9:28 am and is filed under blogs, on the other hand, politics and the public conversation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.