Id like to make an overly obvious comment today....
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!
http://layscience.net/trackback/667
No, you were right first time. A plethora is just what you're describing.
I don't think the plethora is a bad thing at all. ScienceBlogs for example has plenty of sub-categories if you want to focus on a particular topic, or you could just subscribe to the blogs you find interesting and forget the rest.
It's not really possible for any one person to say what's interesting in the whole of science right now. I tried to do that the result would be... well, my blog. Which is fine if, like me, you like neuroscience and psychiatry, less so if you like chemistry or molecular biology. And if you asked me to recommend some chemistry news I wouldn't know where to start.
Good point--there's no 100% accurate way for any one person to tell what's interesting in the whole of science. But, that's the decisions news conglomerates have to make (and have been making for 50 years.) Now that there's unlimited space, they can cover unlimited topics, but there's value in curation--or sorting through this information. Ill defer to Jeff Jarvis now, who says:
(from a post titled 'Death of the curator. Long live the curator.')
Every priesthood, it seems, is having a fit over loss of its centralized control: How dare people pick what they like without history degrees or share what they know without journalism degrees! The nerve!
Except the irony in this comparison is that journalists need to learn better curatorial skills. Yes, in a sense, they’ve always curated information, collecting it, selecting it, giving it context in their stories. But now they have to do that across a much vaster universe: the internet. I hear all the time about the supposed problem of too much information online. Wherever you see a problem, I advise, seek the opportunity in it. There is a need to curate the best of that information (and even the people who gather it). We have many automated means to aggregate news (including Daylife, where I’m a partner). Curation is a step above that, human selection. It’s a way to add value.
I once saw a cartoon somewhere that labeled the effects of this sort of thing "Toxic Option Syndrome".