I wonder how the internet has affected reading patterns re: news. I can preselect my news, and search for only the things I want to see, without even getting the benefit of headlines for things that I might not have thought of or might not want to think of. Also, if we haven't paid for it, explicitly, do we really feel the need to read it attentively, that is, for comprehension?

Reading, though nothing like aerobic, is not a passive activity... that is, not usually, and certainly not in comparison to watching televison.

And it's the comparison to television that leads me to this speculation about obtaining news from the Internet: We are conditioned by our lifetimes' viewing of screens to more passively accept what is displayed on them than we might by reading a newspaper (or listening to radio journalism).

Whatever criterion we may use, and how we go about searching for matches, we will bookmark only that which interests us. Judging from my own bookmarks, as well as from the narrowness of ranges cited by many posters here [for example, the political blogosphere], we subconsciously fall into the same habits as we do with television: once we find a program we like, we watch every week. If there's a conflict, we watch one and record the other, but rarely do we ever deviate. Even our choices of television news programming is habitual, and is as likely as not to be based on aspects related more to style than content.

Newspapers, at least, confront us with choices we must make every time one is delivered: Which article to read, and (this is the most active part) why. Our Internet habits -- derived, I submit, from our television habits -- allow us to make the decision about what to read only once. Our bookmarks become our personalized versions of TV Guide.

Thank the gods of interpersonal communication for places like this, where we can remind each other that there's more on the schedule than the same old thing.