DATE: Wednesday, July 16, 1997 TAG: 9707160395 SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A4 EDITION: FINAL TYPE: Focus SOURCE: BY SCOTT CANON, KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWS SERVICE LENGTH: 44 lines
FOCUS: INFORMATION OVERLOAD
If anybody could make sense of this New Media Order - where to look for information about a fast-changing world, what to believe, how to sort reality from lunacy - one would think Carol Koehler could.
After all, she wrote her doctoral dissertation on critical thinking. She teaches communications studies and specializes in mass media theory.
And she spends the better part of each day devouring newspapers, watching television, perusing academic journals, browsing magazines and trolling the Internet.
``It's more than we can handle,'' said the University of Missouri-Kansas City professor. ``It's coming at us faster than we can possibly fathom it.''
ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox. CNN, ESPN, MSNBC. Web sites, e-mail, chat rooms. Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report. The metropolitan newspapers, the community newspapers, alternative weeklies, advertising circulars tossed at your doorstep whether you want them or not.
If information is power, it is now also a pain.
And a growing argument contends that information is no longer power, at least not when it comes from a bottomless trough, not when the important is buried among the irrelevant, the reliable lumped amid the questionable and blended with the outright erroneous.
``You're not more informed. You're just numbed,'' said Tom Rosenstiel, a former Los Angeles Times media critic.
``The communication revolution has made it harder, not easier, to learn the truth. It's easier to get information today than ever before, (but) it's harder to get the right information.'' For complete copy of this wire story, see microfilm KEYWORDS: INFORMATION DATA
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