Fragmented realities and media vertigo

One thing I think about these days is which, if any, media reality I belong to.  It used to be simple.  When I started blogging in 2001 I lived at the border between two media realities: The Norwegian news media, and the emerging web media.  As I saw it the two realities were in conflict, but I had a clear picture of where they stood in relation to each other, and I in relation to them.

Now .. In the last 24 hours alone, I’ve: 1) Read two Danish and Norwegian newspapers on the iPad, 2) watched old episodes of the British news comedy show Have I Got News For You, 3) browsed YouTube clips from the protests in Egypt, (some of them from Al Jazeera English, the world’s best news channel), 4) paid half attention to Twitter, (the excitable hive mind that sometimes tells you something amazingly interesting), 5) browsed through some opinionated blog entries, 6) and checked for new videos on Fora.tv.

Other days are different, but similarly fragmented.  What strikes me is that I don’t know where all these media stand in relation to each other.  There is no one bigger conversation.  Partly the same topics, but not the same conversation, just many small ones that each insist on being the one that matters.

I think I’m describing something that always was, but noticing it, that’s new.  The vertigo from realizing that you don’t quite know where you are in relation to everything else. I can’t decide if this is a temporary confusion, or a higher form of media consumption.