Once upon a time I used to read The Guardian on the way to work and a book on the way home. A neat solution to the problems of commuting since I kept in touch with the world while having plenty of material to review for NMR!. But the newspaper industry was revolutionised in the mid 1980s, the power of the unions broken, production became cheaper and page counts began to grow. There was also the boom in that (bogus) Thatcherite concept of choice, and new papers were encouraged to start and grow. And so The Guardian began to take longer and longer to read; sometimes I barely got any of my book read on the train, by the mid 90s I found that I had barely started the second section of the paper by the time I got home.
And yet, what had I read? There was a time when reading a daily newspaper, a Sunday and perhaps a weekly magazine meant you knew what there was to know. If you read the Harold Evans’ Sunday Times you could confidently expect to join in every vaguely intellectual conversation on Monday. Not any more. Despite spending more time than ever before reading publications, I was feeling less and less in touch. Looking around the newstands every paper was by now brimming with supplements and specials, the current Sunday Times encapsulating everything I hate about this trend. What I wanted was a paper that gave me what I wanted to know, concisely and readably in a reasonable time. In actual fact, the papers are moving ever further away from that ideal.
My solution has been to stop reading the papers. One of the minor effects of my massive life-style changes over the past couple of years is that I now only read The Guardian on Mondays (Media/weekend sport) which takes me till Wednesday to read anyway, and on Saturday (far superior to any of the Sundays). Hence I have carved out a little bit of time to read the occasional book.
But the information revolution has not stopped at the newspapers. Television has changed irrevocably over the past five years. The result is that there is vastly more hours of television to watch, but the programmes are exactly the same, endlessly recycled. What's on Sky tonight? Friends or ER; UK Gold has The Bill and Eastenders, Bravo The A Team... More channels, less choice. Meanwhile the BBC has been taken over by a news junkie who really doesn't know when to stop.
I used to consider myself to be a current affairs freak, who just couldn't get enough news. Not any more. Even Birks must wonder how they fill the various programmes. The final act of stupidity is the BBC 24 hour rolling news service. Apparently the Corporation felt they had to compete with Sky and CNN. A perfectly reasonable alternative view is to say that as this service is already being offered, let's leave it to them and use the license fee to do something that isn't already available.
The end result is that we have vast hours of the schedule given over to news and nothing to fill it. Hence the extraordinary trivialisation of the news agenda. With war on Iraq about to be declared, the media was obsessed with the US president's sex life. Clinton is no saint, but then few US presidents have been! This was debased even further in the UK with the Robin Cook scandal (he thought about offering a job to his mistress then decided it was a bad idea - some scandal). Oh and some rumbling complaints about the Lord Chancellor's wall paper.
It is not as if there is a shortage of major news items to cover; but most are complex, slow-moving and rather boring to the uninitiated. It is difficult to create snappy 3 minute pieces for News at Ten on global warming, East African famine, EMU or the rise of Islam. With vast acres of news to be covered, and a mission to entertain rather than educate, trivial personality-led items rule the day rather than the serious policy decisions which really matter.
The only unmissable news programme remains Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. In depth coverage from reporters who are living in a particular situation, genuinely educational, this is what BBC Rolling news service had the opportunity to do. But it didn't.
My overall feeling of the Information Revolution is that despite there being more newsprint consumed than ever before, more hours of news on the radio and a clutch of news TV channels, our actual real information of the world and the issues that matter is probably worse than it was twenty years ago.
And I haven't even mentioned the Internet, but that can wait for another time...