hawthornso23
October 31st, 2012, 02:59 AM
It is often said that television changed the nature of the news by requiring all stories to fit into a ten second soundbite in order to get coverage. I feel like the advent of touchscreen smartphones on the internet in large numbers is starting to impose a similar change on the internet - dumbing it down - shrinking it - forcing everything to fit on a tiny touch screen.
I've been recently finding Google News increasingly frustrating to use on my desktop and I've just realised that this is why. The main page by default now shows only one story on each topic. If there is a topic I am interested in I want to browse multiple sources. This used to be easy - now it is less so. You now have to drill down through the inaptly named "realtime coverage" link and go a couple of layers deep to get at other stories covering the same topic. The format is all one column now. There is a lot less news on the screen at one time and you have to scroll and click incessantly to get at more.
I can see all this makes sense on a tablet or smartphone. But I've got a desktop with multiple large screens. It is starting to frustrate me. It feels like being forced to look at the world through a cardboard tube. Please Google and others who have redesigned everything to be smartphone friendly. Could we have desktop editions for people still using large screens who want to have more information visible at once.
I've been recently finding Google News increasingly frustrating to use on my desktop and I've just realised that this is why. The main page by default now shows only one story on each topic. If there is a topic I am interested in I want to browse multiple sources. This used to be easy - now it is less so. You now have to drill down through the inaptly named "realtime coverage" link and go a couple of layers deep to get at other stories covering the same topic. The format is all one column now. There is a lot less news on the screen at one time and you have to scroll and click incessantly to get at more.
I can see all this makes sense on a tablet or smartphone. But I've got a desktop with multiple large screens. It is starting to frustrate me. It feels like being forced to look at the world through a cardboard tube. Please Google and others who have redesigned everything to be smartphone friendly. Could we have desktop editions for people still using large screens who want to have more information visible at once.