Clinamen

I'm not sure how much RSS is catching on among non-techies, but then "techies" is becoming an ever more inclusive term. I think, for instance, most people who blog also get news through RSS readers.

I appreciate you raising the question of how the kairos is changed when we take the message to a different medium, and certainly that's precisely what occurs in news readers. I will point out that you're describing browser-specific readers or feed collectors, and it might be interesting to think about how the kairos is different (yet again) in readers that function independently of internet browsers. For instance, I use NewsFire (only available for Macs), and it includes image integration (screenshot here). Contrast that to the Safari shot of the same blog entry. Sure, there's a context of content lost, and the links (to things like the comments) are a couple of clicks away now, but how much does this alter the viewing experience? I suspect a lot, but the question to follow up with -- the crucial question, I think -- is: In what way?

I suspect that a lot of users find RSS to be a "really simple" way of retrieving news from a lot of different sources. I can, for instance, leave NewsFire open, and I will hear when my students upload their response papers to their blogs on my course website. That lets me avoid having to hit reload every few minutes -- which saves a little time by making me slightly less distracted. On the other hand, while I wait, listening for chimes from my computer, I read other newsfeeds from the various other blogs I enjoy, meaning I'm only distracting myself in an entirely different way. I can't say that the latter is more productive, but it is more social, in the sense that I'm interacting, if I choose to post or if I choose to get to know a person(a) by reading h/er blog, with Others. And that does beat interacting with my mouse.

I have met, no I should say "become aware of," a lot of other grad students at other universities who share my interests as a result of their blogs, and I have come to know their blogs in large part because of using a newsreader.

But absolutely, a newsreader is a mediated viewing of a particular content.