Submitted by Jim Brown on March 11, 2006 - 8:18am.
So, I'm really trying to jump on the RSS train. I've added some feeds to this site, and I've made my RSS reader my browser home page. I'm basically forcing this technology on myself to try it out. Now, this really isn't my first swim through RSS. For many years, I used Yahoo's "My Yahoo" page as my home page. "My Yahoo" allows you to add RSS feeds along with other types of content, and it bundles that content with links to my email and my fantasy baseball team. It's a one stop shop.
Here's what the "My Yahoo" page looks like, and here's what my current RSS page looks like. Both provide content from all over, though the yahoo presentation is probably a little bit nicer to look at. However, there's something that both of these pages do that interests me: They rip content from other contexts and place them on my desktop.
In essence, RSS seems to be based on the assumption that the text is what matters. Thus, if there's a New York Times story about Abu Graib or a CFP from tech geek story from Slashdot, RSS readers can' t provide that text in context. An RSS reader doesn't give you the story in it's visual context, it doesn't show you the story next to other stories. It might even take away the important experience of browsing a web page and scanning through headlines. We might say that RSS merely puts off this experience. Once you click on one of your RSS links, you're taken to the web page, right? But aren't you most times taken to a persistent link for that web page? Haven't you skipped straight to one story, sneaking in through a side door and skipping the front page?
All of these factor lead me to think that RSS either skips the kairotic event of reading a web page or creates a brand new kairotic event.
[definition of Kairos - "Fullness of time; the propitious moment for the performance of an action or the coming into being of a new state." (OED)]
When we read a website, infinite factors are at play (some of which, incidentally, have absolutely nothing to do with the site or its design). All of those factors are a part of kairos - a part of the singular experience of reading a website at any given moment. What does RSS do to that experience? What does RSS do to web content? Does it assume that content is content, regardless of how we come to it? Can RSS itself assume anything, or does our use of it mean that we are making assumptions about content? Is RSS really taking off as a technology, or is it something still confined to techies and geeks?
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.