I, me, myself

Let me start by confessing that I am a thirty-something anachronism. I still read the hard copies of the New York Times and the Boston Globe, and I refuse to consider changing my habits. My students marvel at me the way I once marvelled at my mother for being slow to get an e-mail account8230; True, smudge isn8217;t great, but it seems a small price to pay for what the newspaper offers: serendipitous discovery and wide-angle perspective.

Much has been made of the convening and mobilising power of today8217;s technology. A person inspired by a cause can blog about their outrage and plot a response on Facebook with other similarly animated people. While any single congressional district might not produce a groundswell to demand a halt to global warming or killing in Darfur, a virtual community unmoored from geography can deliver a critical mass. And once converted, advocates are far better informed than a generation ago. They can hear the personal tales of aid workers over Skype. When the Western press steers clear, they can access and share local media reports. Thanks to what Chris Anderson called the 8220;long tail8221;, far more documentaries are available than when movie theatres and video stores catered only to the most popular side of the market.

For many of us, though, technology has actually lowered the odds of bumping into inconvenient knowledge8230; Amid the hoopla over new media, it is worth considering the costs of the personalisation of news. Sure, viral YouTube videos of global conflicts and tragedies will occasionally find an audience, and movements may grow up around iconic new-media images as they did around the old. But while the long tail ensures once obscure documentaries remain available, citizen advocacy may have a short tail, causing the number of viable causes to get winnowed to a handful of megacauses. Burma may achieve the requisite market share, while Burundi fails to penetrate at all.

Excerpted from Samantha Powers8217; 8216;The short tail8217; in the latest issue of Time