posted on Jun, 20 2010 @ 12:06 PM
Just sort of a ranty, consciousness thing...
One of my pet peeves (mainly because I'm a bit OCD and like things in one, neat little handy place) is the lack of followup on threads...in other
words, new information becomes available, sometimes days and sometimes even weeks or months later and it's either not posted or a new topic is
started.
This information might corroborate, support, or just be news about the initial story, and sometimes it resolves it or is a retraction or correction.
To me, it can bring a sense of continuity or closure that's so rare these days. Don't get me wrong, I love chaos and anarchy as much as the next
person, but things are happening faster and faster and it's so easy to miss things.
It seems that when new information comes along, it's a lot easier to start a new thread than to add as followup information on an existing thread for
the topic. I'm totally guilty of that myself, sometimes intentionally lazy and sometimes I just can't find something easily. Yeah, it's not always
easy to search through the myriad of threads and forums and topics here, I know. But if you're the OP maybe a bit of followup is a good thing now and
then?
And by the way, lack of followup and completion is not a problem just here in ATS either. Our news media is getting worse and worse about this too.
Maybe it's just a symptom of information overload or shoddy research or laziness or all of the above, but it seems to be happening more and more.
Lately I'm even noticing a trend where they news media is posting stories from 5 and 6 years ago and making like they're something "new,"
sometimes merely substituting the words "Obama administration" for "Bush administration, which is freakish to watch in itself, when people who
wholeheartedly supported Bush now bash Obama for the very same thing and vice versa. An example of this would be the EMP weapon story this week and
plans to use it in Afghanistan.
Um this weapon has already been used in both Iraq and Afghanistan, in the early 2000s, and it's been in discussion since 1988 at least. And by the
way, they were also testing it or approved to start testing it on U.S. citizens. That could have been mentioned in the story, no? Why treat this as if
it's totally new news? Doing so does readers a disservice and to me is shoddy journalism...lack of focus, depth, research, and perspective. It's as
if it's totally new news to the writer, so let's just treat it that way and ignore all sorts of history and background.
Now I know we're not the news media or professional journalists here at ATS, not most of us anyway. (Some posters are of such caliber that they
really could and should be, and they far outdo the professionals as far as level of detail and thorough research and investigation, but that's a
whole other topic.) But I think that a few extra minutes in a followup can be invaluable.
What do you think?