Taste Cheese with Chopsticks

I interned at a Hong Kong-based weekly news magazine in winter term, and I made some observations on fragmentation of information by reading news everyday from news outlets in China and in the U.S.

If I only have 10 minutes before I go to work and need to skim some news, I’ll choose the New York Times over the People’s Daily, Nanfang Daily or any other Chinese media website.

The homepage of Chinese media tends to be the front-page layout of their paper. There is no selected news under different sections, and no active links that directs readers to the text of any article; only the PDF version of the paper is available.

I always find interesting reports on China, the Middle East and all parts of the world on the New York Times homepage, but world news rarely becomes the headline of any Chinese newspaper.

The narrow view is not the most unbearable part – the fragmented information is. Chinese news media only provide the least information you need to know about any pieces — most of the articles online are under 400 words, while western media offers in-depth stories. Most of the news on the New York Times is over two pages, and some fascinating feature reports can be over seven pages.

It is not hard to see how different styles of reporting in the West and in China affects the ways of speaking out in public.

I read comments before purchasing an item on Amazon, both in the U.S. and in China. The average quantity and quality of comments on amazon.cn are lower than those on amazon.com. Take One Hundred Years of Solitude as an example: most of the comments on amazon.cn focus on the quality of packing and mention nothing about the book itself. On amazon.com, however, all the comments sound like book critiques, and a lot of them are over 800 words. For a kettle, the comments on amazon.cn tend to be under two sentences; even when people are complaining about a kettle, they give no detail. But on amazon.com, users tend to be more responsible and will come back and edit their comments after using the kettle for several months, and the information can be very useful for potential buyers.

Similar things also happen on social media. In college, most of my friends don’t have Twitter accounts, and they barely post anything on Facebook. They value face-to-face communication. But in China, when I meet with my high school friends, the scene is totally different: everyone is on Weibo (Chinese version of Twitter) or Renren (Chinese version of Facebook) at the get together. My college friends share links of news reports and long critiques of events on Facebook, while my high school friends in China spend tons of time lingering on Weibo but only repost other’s short comments without creating any original post. One hundred and forty characters can be an efficient way to communicate, but it should not be the only way.

Fragmentation also limits our judgments. A 400-word news report can only include the basic who, where, when, what and how, and leaves no room for analysis. Even when analysis is present in those short reports, it will not be comprehensive and becomes biased.

I guess it is hard to avoid being fragmented in this era. News reporting is competing with short judgment, persuasive photos and self-explaining graphics. We, however, need to consciously avoid becoming impatient and shallow.