Uh, wrong. In his last post, Bill argues that our desire "to see the world around us, a world where relatively little of genuine import is happening, as full of sparkle and life and promise" is what creates our extravagant expectations for our news. "If I'm refreshing my RSS reader every ten seconds," he writes, "something important must be changing -- right?"

First, I really disagree with the idea that we currently live in a world where little of genuine import is happening. Maybe I could see this being the case, say, a decade ago--although, man, Bosnia and Rwanda and Clinton's impeachment sure did seem like big deals at the time--but I have a hard time believing we live in dull times today, not with the global economic crisis and health care reform and two wars and our first black president and UNC's upcoming national title defense. In a way, I think it's precisely the fact that so much is going on that leads us to constantly refresh our RSS readers (although, full disclosure, I don't actually have an RSS reader, owing to a combination of technological incompetence and a desire not to succumb to the temptation to constantly refresh it).

I know that my impatience for news is greatest when real, important news is occurring--like, most recently, during the Iranian uprisings, when I couldn't go a half-hour without checking Andrew Sullivan and Nico Pitney. It didn't matter that their reposting of various Tweets and what not usually left me more confused and uncertain of what was actually happening in Iran than I'd been before I checked their sites; I still felt like I needed to know.

The problem with this impatience--and the Internet allowing us to so easily satisfy it--is that it often detracts from a fuller, deeper understanding of what's going on in the world. I confess to being one of the few remaining people who actually reads The New York Times print edition most every morning. But whereas I used to finish almost every article in the front section, these days I finish, at most, half of them. Part of this is due to time constraints, but the bigger reason is that, with a lot of the stories, I already know a good bit of what they're about, since so much of the news they're reporting has come out in dribs and drabs on the web the day before.

Of course, the previous day's Internet droppings rarely add up to anything as comprehensive as the article in that morning's Times, but it doesn't matter. Part of the joy of picking up the morning paper is the element of surprise: what am I going to discover about the world today? The web has largely killed that. Tortured metaphor alert, but the online news world reminds me of a movie preview with spoilers. By the time the actual full-length feature is released--in the form of a meaty newspaper article--there's not much of a reason to see it.

That's the real problem with nanostories as far as I'm concerned. All the information out there often results in my knowing less, not more.