"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
-Herbert A. Simon, Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, 1971
[Author's Note: The above graph is actually a picture of a graph taken from my phone and uploaded here. It's amateur hour at The Shanty today. Converting TIFF files to JPEG files is really hard, so this will have to do. Hopefully, the graph's explanation below will cure any ambiguities created by the fuzzy text. If not, please comment below]The above graph has been excerpted from Matthew Hindman's The Myth of Digital Democracy (p. 61) (2009). He explains the graph in the following terms:
Figure 4.1 demonstrates visually just how important news sites and political sites are--or are not--in comparison to other online content, using Hitwise traffic data from March 2007. The outer circle represents the total volume of Internet traffic. Within it, smaller circles show the amount of traffic that goes to specific categories of Web usage. The figure is to scale: the area of each circle is proportional to the amount of traffic each category receives.
Overall, about 10.5 percent of Web traffic goes to adult or pornographic Web sites. A slightly smaller portion (9.6 percent) goes to Webmail services such as Yahoo! mail or Hotmail, 7.2 percent of traffic goes to search engines, while only 2.9 percent of Web traffic goes to news and media sites.... In the center of figure 4.1 is a small circle denoting the 0.12 percent of traffic that goes to political Web sites.
That's about 30% of web traffic accounted for, and a third of that for porno. There you go, that's the magic of the Web. Keep on 'batin' America!
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