Smorgasbord

I’ve taken up listening to my childhood favorite radio station again, P3. It’s one of many channels by the public service radio broadcaster in Sweden. There’s however no frequency where I live these days, so I have to listen to it via the internet, which is ok.

But not only can I listen to P3, but also to P3 Svea (only Swedish music), P3 Rockster (rock music only), P3 Street (Hiphop and r’n’b) and P3 Star. What a segmentation, I don’t know which one to choose! But since I like to listen to blends of music, and not just one genre, I usually go with the “original” P3.

Mark Glaser had similar experiences with the smorgasbord phenomenon when he tried to follow the Democratic National Convention, not via tv, radio or print media, but via blogs only.

"Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the blog-only experience was knowing where to go for what, and when. With so many blogs in on the action -- or commenting on the action from afar -- it often felt like trying to find a snowflake in an avalanche. On TV, you might have the choice of the networks (for an hour each night) or Fox News, CNN or MSNBC. But with blogs, you had to choose between a smorgasbord of offerings."

Glaser decided to use many sources to get information on the Convention, among others a "best of the blogs" blog, Technorati and Bloglines that run feeds from various weblogs. Perhaps this is the third stage of the history of media? By his famous statement “The medium is the message”, Marshall McLuhan meant that the history of the media falls into 3 periods. The first one is an oral culture, where a piece of news was narrated and the way of thought was circular. The second one was the culture of writing and printing where linear thinking develops. The third period is the electronic culture, where, according to McLuhan, the media will bring about radical shifts. Perhaps this hypertext, where the reader jumps around between websites, following links, travels back and forth in a text and in different settings is this radical shift.