We are prejudiced against material that doesn’t identify itself as ‘New’ and this is a problem not just with the majority of online information consumers but also the websites that pander to this ‘old media’ bias.
Whether something’s “new” or “breaking” is a concern for newspaper writers seeking scoops. There’s no reason on Earth a website […] should feel any obligation to flood its pages with constant new material. If what’s written in the site is written well, and timeless, the site should work like a book. The reader can click in, scan the volumes of text and read what he or she likes. The only reason website content producers feel the need to crank out “New! New! New!” shit every day is because they’ve decided, for reasons beyond me, to compete with the 90% of bloggers who do nothing but grab hot stories, comment on them and link other comments about it from people in their network of friends. That’s not an audience – that’s an echo chamber. […]
So what’s the cure? […] Approach the content producing sites like books. When we find one we like, maybe stop, slow down, read the back catalog. Take it as a collection of essays, a running memoir or the written equivalent of stand-up comedy. […]
Most of our lives are spent grappling with, fearing and resenting deadlines. Why limit the material we read for pleasure with artificial ‘freshness’ criteria? There are pages behind the face pages of websites, and all of the material’s free.
This is how I find the majority of the items that I share here; this article is almost a year old.
A compilation of the best things I posted in the site’s first year (and its second year, a compilation of which I’m creating now) is full of articles as relevant now as when they were initially published. (Irony? Plug? Me?)