Read All About It!

Newspapers have a long history. They can be traced back to Ancient Rome, when the public used to gather around the government bulletin attached to notice boards. Although all ‘news’ in this period must have drawn people’s attention, both the literate population and the actual amount of information were severely limited.
  
Later, as literacy rates grew, so did the number and issue-frequency of newspapers. In this way, newspapers, the record of government and of citizens’ daily lives, have played an important role in expanding people’s knowledge and vision of the world.

Until the late twentieth century, one of the salient features of newspapers was their capacity to provide an overview of events, so people could roughly grasp the day’s news at a glance. However, with the advent of the so-called ‘internet era’, the newspaper has been transformed yet again and many are now published in electronic format, and back copies have been digitalized.

People are no longer carrying bulky, inconvenient newspapers on packed rush-hour trains. Instead, they can “carry” the contents of hundreds of newspapers on small tablets. Pages are now layered and buried so deep on the virtual screen monitor that you never sense how much actual information is there. Furthermore, highly accessed topics are already presented to you to read on the front page, based on the reading habits of others—a sort of self-propelling selection process.

Under such conditions, readers are in a sense deprived of their right to select what they want to read. This packaging of news stories indicates one of the problems of excessive development of technology.

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