In yesterday's Wall Street Journal an editorial reported on the penchant of people today to get their news from the internet. L. Gordon Crovitz ["@Cicero Would Have Loved Twitter," WSJ (28 October 2013), A13] suggested that getting news from social networking sources, such as Facebook and Twitter, was simply returning to the method of news sharing and gathering that was used before the invention of the mass media, such as newspapers, TV, and radio. The social media are simply more powerful forms of "word-of-mouth" reporting. The ancients all had "correspondents," people to whom they wrote and upon whom they depended for the transmission of the news of the day. Newspapers turned this into a professional cadre by paying for the transmissions and printing them in the pages of a newspaper. Before the printing press, the letters of people like the Roman advocate, Cicero, were copied and shared with people who wanted to know the news. Crovitz cites one of the unintended benefits of the old media, such as newspapers; finishability. What he means is that you can sit down and read the daily paper, and after finishing it you can reasonably say you know the news of the day.

Browsing the web, by contrast, is a never ending resource. Its information is unconquerable because it is so massive and is constantly changing. There is no finishability. Of course, as we also know trustworthy sources are hard to ferret out of the avalanche of information that our electronic devices pour out. Along with finishability, resources that carry with them a trustworthy reputation, like the old BBC had during WW II, mean that people will seek them out. We can become weary of trying to sort through the less reputable and the unending reporting available through social media. Personally, I get tired of surfing the internet for news, because there is so much sludge out there. It is easier to trust one quality source.