Media

I learned to read from the pages of the Globe and Mail newspaper. For longer than I'm prepared to admit (as in -- since Grade 2) opening that paper has been part of my morning ritual. I've stuck with it through thick and thin, borne with some of it's ill-fated attempts at investigative journalism, it's deep insights, it's left-wing sense of social justice and it's right wing apologists who heaped praise on (choose a pejorative) like Conrad Black, even it's tragically misdirected hiring of Christie Blatchford (complete with some contractual clause that seems to guarantee her at least a sliver of space on the front page every time she writes an article, no matter what).

Leah McLaren recently wrote an interesting article, titled "Logging out of the blogosphere" where she describes the reasoning behind her decision to stop reading blogs. I must admit I find myself agreeing with her in many respects. Even correcting for the volumes of garbage from spam and search engine placement games, the signal to noise ratio -- the ratio of useful, accurate, or meaningful content to incoherent, unoriginal and redundant content is disturbingly low. This is a problem with ideas that get picked up en masse on the net. Universal accessibility implies average results. For this a favourite phrase comes to mind: It's almost like half the people have below average intelligence.