Media Black Hole: So Much News That We'll Implode?

When it comes to the news of the day, newspapers, websites, bloggers, cable networks and aggregators all trip over themselves to be the fastest and the first.

The competition has always existed, but technology has ramped up the rivalries. At this increasingly accelerated pace, is it inevitable that noteworthy events — and the news they engender — will rush lickety-split into each other? What happens when things just cannot occur any faster? What if the rapidity of the newscycle outpaces the news itself and we wind up in some form of warp speed — living life in a wormholish, time-wrinkled world? James Gleick, author of the 1999 classic Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, says, "Everybody thinks there's got to be a breaking point. But the breaking point never comes." Steven Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers Are Creators, believes we will learn to navigate the new world with the help of other navigators. He wrote in The Huffington Post that we are living in "a world where abundance is assumed in the world of content — there's no shortage of content makers of all shapes and sizes. But the avalanche of content makes finding the content you're looking for significantly harder." By choosing to read a certain story or subscribe to a certain blog — and letting others know that we "like" the stories and blogs — we are saving time for those who trust us, according to Rosenbaum.