As communication practices have advanced the great irony is our ability to stay broadly informed has diminished.  Simply put, the multitude of souces and variety of content can be overwhelming.

When I was growing up staying informed on key local, national and international information meant subscribing to a daily newspaper and watching the main TV news, say the evening brodacast.

Filtering

Todays flow of information from social media feeds to mobile device alerts, updates on your watch, the list of ways to both get and share information both quickly and easily is really large.

Many of my colleagues, acquaintances, freiends and family, in fact most of them, are on email overload with 50 to 500 messages daily.

This type of fast and frequent communication did not occur with snail mail.  Verbal contact used to require access to a phone in a fixed location, home or phone booth, of course today you just carry it with you.

Choosing When to pay Attention

Staying informed used to largely based on what the limited information sources choose to prioritize and share with you.  Usually it was just fine.

Today you need to do the analysis yourself and that can be challenging.  You might have access to critical information you should be aware of and just overlook it.

Personally, to some extent I continue to rely  on the daily news paper and news cast to select and inform me on what I need to know, sadly those the days are slowy coming to an end.

Traditional media is being transformed and the formats I am most familiar with continue to dissappear.  I am adapting ongoing but do miss the past practices a bit. 

Change is largely good, we just need to accept and adopt the most current ways if we want to continue to thrive.