Nerve Endings Firing Away

When I had almost given up Gaurav for dead (in the blogospheric sense, of course), he comes back sharing interesting media and marketing-related tidbits that I otherwise wouldn’t have noticed. He writes on the new meme streaking through the marketing blogosphere (reminds me that I must read Seth Godin more regularly), MediaSnackers. Never mind the camel back capitalization of Web 2.0 terms, MediaSnackers are (mostly) young people who consume media in bits and bytes. moving from one source of information to another in quick succession (without completely digesting them completely?). Here is a video that explains it better.

So are we MediaSnackers too? I am no longer one of the 20-something yuppies although I share plenty of characteristics and identify with their media consumption behavior. Thanks to my MediaSnackiness, I have almost developed an attention-deficit disorder for large texts especially if I am reading them online. Although I get most of my news online, I still prefer reading newspapers and weekly news magazines for a better understanding of the issues. However, there is plenty of information creep out there and the frequently-updated Asides section on my blog reflects that. Sometimes certain observations or opinions do not go beyond couple of lines and although given the rambling nature of my posts, it can be quite an effort to keep it short. So in a way, the Asides or even Twitter helps me focus while providing a pointer to the main story. Previously, I used the del.icio.us javascript to post my bookmarked links at the top of the homepage. But this had few problems – feed readers never got them, no more than 5 latest links could appear on the homepage and stored links with commentary as opposed to only links at places other than my blog.

Is MediaSnackiness worth it? Well, it depends. It certainly gives you a host of information on varied topics. But in the spirit of Jack of all trades, it gives you only passing information that you probably can make small talk at social gatherings to give an impression of knowing it all or being really aware of your times. On the other hand, it also allows you to scrounge around for information on different topics which then allows you to delve deeper into topics that interest you. Given the everything-goes nature of topics on this blog, you may have still noticed a focus on some topics than others and this focus may keep shifting as this blog matures. It is merely a reflection of my current interests and tastes. It would make for interesting reading in the future.