Internet Already Obsolete
Here is perhaps the most surprising finding from a new survey of what teenagers want from online news: “BEWARE OF TOO MUCH SCROLLING AND CLICKING.”
“I don’t know if it is just me, but scrolling down a bunch of information is more overwhelming to me,” says William, 18.
“I don’t really want to click on things,” says Maria, 14.
So much for the internet. Scrolling and clicking are out. That leaves…reading? No.
“They fuzz out when confronted with long, uninterrupted blocks of text,” the survey says. “They don’t seem to be able to absorb information or become interested in it unless it’s broken up and illustrated.”
OK, got it: Pictures are good. Happy pictures.
“Teens can find the very subjects of the news stressful. News of crimes and wars makes them feel unsafe. News about the economy and the environment worries them.”
If “the news is too time-consuming, difficult or unpleasant, it’s not worth the effort.”
We feel that. Why bother trying to “get” anything? It’s a lot of work.
“Understanding the news is not always easy for them… [M]ost news stories and sites assume users possess a certain background of orienting knowledge about issues, players and history – knowledge many teens don’t have…
“They don’t want to ‘follow the news.’ That would mean mastering daily ins and outs of a variety of news stories, which requires more background, time and interest than they have.”
The news site of the future? It’s already here. See it after the cut. (Sorry, you’ll have to click.)
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April 10th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Poor teenagers! With all the pressures they’ve got these days we now expect them to click and scroll! Terrible.
I’ve noticed this trend lately on tumblr.com blogs. They’re usually full of images with an incomplete sentence or two at the bottom that “explains” why the image or song (copyrights be damned!) were posted. Those blogs with a lot of words don’t seem to be terribly popular.
When the Mumbai attacks occurred last year the blogs–which allow users to easily repost other posts and kind of ends up as one big daisy chain of images–these blogs were filled with images of the attacks and from the comments below them seemed like the only information a lot of the users were getting on the situation. Well, that an twitter. Guess us journos are going to have to give up the rules of grammar so we can get the info out there in bite-sized, colorful snippets!