I used to read the local newspaper. It was a fairly poor quality view of world events.

As news sources moved to the web I started to read a wider variety of sources – BBC, Le Monde, Haaretz, NY Times, Google News, various Iranian publications, and so forth. I had a better view.

As RSS took over I started to spend more time in Google Reader, with a larger number of sources. The sources, however, were hand-picked by me and the topics they covered were much more niche.

Sure, I had the feed from the NY Times, BBC, etc, but they just couldn’t compete with the blogs. I would only read them occasionally, and finally I gave up and removed them from my feed.

Nowadays I hang out on Twitter, to the detriment of Google Reader.

My sources of news are even more niche, even more hand-picked, and the news itself is headline-only.

It strikes me that I’ve lost something valuable here. I went from being exposed to a world view, much of which I didn’t agree with, to a series of very short, niche, hand-picked news sources.

I have unwittingly self-applied blinders.

An odd and disturbing trend. Nothing is stopping me from regaining the world view, other than my own choices. Yet I remain mostly blind.