COMMENTARY | AS I SEE IT

What's crucial in selecting blogs: quality not quantity

As I was looking through Time magazine’s list of top 25 blogs of 2009, I realized just how extensive and personalized our world has become.

There are news blogs, thousands of them, of all stripes and slants. There are technology blogs, food blogs, and even blogs about blogs. This list really indicated to me the pure volume of information on the Internet, and how, at this time, we simultaneously have an amazing opportunity and a dangerous temptation. I’ll start with the bad news.

With the breadth of information available, and the variety of sources and slants to every possible newsworthy event, people browsing run the risk of narrowing their experience into one customized exactly for themselves.

By focusing on just a few Web sites for news or just a few blogs for entertainment, one moves toward the very perilous mental state of feeling informed. I say “feeling” because one is not truly informed without exploring a diverse breadth of views and information.

If people follow only sites slanting toward what they agree with, it will further polarize people into their own little worlds instead of the real, globalized world in which we live. On the other hand, the incredible amount of information available also gives us the amazing opportunity to be the most informed people ever.

Expanding and deepening our experience by using the vast amount of sources and opinions at our fingertips will only better inform us and help to explain and break down our complex world.

There is a great chance now for us to be the best-educated, most worldly people in history. Yet many people would rather watch a Perez Hilton video than read a story on Reuters.

What I’m advocating is diverse, open-minded education focused on the goal of being accurately and wholly informed, which allows people to be more productive, contributing members of society.

This is not a call to read more stories in The Star or spend more time reading the Drudge Report. What is important is quality over quantity, and exploring divergent opinions to really understand and qualify what one believes.

By seeking several sources of news and entertainment, we are much more likely to uncover the truth, along with being able to form our own opinions, rather than simply agreeing with whatever we may read on an editorial page.

This personal ownership of information and opinion is readily available to us all over the Internet, and to not take total advantage of this opportunity is a grave mistake.

My hope is not that everyone spends 10 hours of every day reading news articles. That would be counterproductive. Rather, I hope that people expand their sources.

Instead of getting information solely from the Drudge Report, try reading Reuters, Salon.com and the Drudge Report.

By doing that, you can decide what to believe, rather than having only one slanted source, whatever that slant may be.

Simply, my request is this: Strive to be, not feel, informed.

Nate Apathy is a junior economics major at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb. He lives in Leawood.

• Most Read