I’ve been searching for an analogy that might help me get my head around the shift happening in the news/media/information space and I think – thanks to this article (though it has little to do with it really) – that I have finally come up with something that makes sense.

In reading the post in question I was struck by how some print minded folks apparently need to be “spoon-fed” their news. It just seems to me that the comfort of print isn’t so much about the ink on paper as it is about the limitation the format provides.

When I read about people taking perfectly good digital information and pushing it through the network right down to the last mile only to have it ossified in print it makes me wonder – do these people have no interest in feeding themselves? Is their need for authority, for editorial oversight, for somebody else’s fixed point of view, so all consuming that they would so willingly give up their right and ability to receive their information in a flexible, checkable, questionable, repairable, living, breathing digital format?

The more I thought on these questions the more the phrase “spoon-fed” stood out – it made me think of my one year old. And then I realized – that’s were we’ve been. In the twentieth century news and media model we were all infants, happily eating up whatever mamma (the press) fed to us. We didn’t care – we didn’t know any better. Strained peas was all we knew.

Now – here in the information age – we’re reaching a point were most of us are like my four year old. We have an idea of what we like. We still feel compelled to listen to mamma and eat our veggies from time to time, but for the most part we can decide what to eat and we can – again, for the most part – feed ourselves.

Before long there will come a time when mamma’s not around – or at least not so around. In our college years we feast on a pleasing yet fundamentally unhealthy diet of beer, fast food, beer, pizza, beer, and maybe – from time to time – some weed. That’s fun, but when the shit really hits the fan we still head home to momma for Thanksgiving turkey.

At some point almost everyone graduates – almost everyone will reach that post college world where we maybe have a little bit of money and a slight idea that there’s more to food that just Cheetos. We start to seek out new tastes, exotic flavors, wild aromas. We may even start to dabble with cooking some of our own meals.

At first there are mistakes… fires even. Yet slowly we learn to cook. We learn techniques, we experiment with spices, we may even grow our food. We become self-sustaining.

Perhaps not everyone’s food journey goes like that – and there is no reason why we should think that everyone’s informational consumption will either. Still, if this sloppy analogy has given any clarity at all to the way I view what’s happening in the media space, it’s this: we are evolving… we are growing up and away from mamma.