Some of you will share this link, but even if you do, most of you won’t read the whole post. That’s according to a Washington Post article, “6 in 10 of you will share this link without reading it, a new, depressing study says.” It’s also my experience. Our world has become saturated in information. Not knowledge, but information. It’s especially fueled by social media. From the Washington Post article:

“People are more willing to share an article than read it,” study co-author Arnaud Legout said in a statement. “This is typical of modern information consumption. People form an opinion based on a summary, or a summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper.”

I started writing long enough ago that I’d often have to wait until it hit the newstand to see it. When I wrote opinion articles for the Seattle Times, for example, I would have to walk to a paper box, put in change, pull out a paper, and shuffle through the pages to see my article. There was no way to share it other than calling people up and asking them to read it. We counted on the dominance of the variance media outlets. They shared our thoughts once in a long while.

Now everyone has what amounts to their own media operation with the equivalent of a radio and television studio. We all can create our own content by writing about our lunch or what we did that day, then sharing a series article about a disease, and then a funny story about a cat and dog. That’s what Good Morning America used to be for. Now everyone is their own producer, and we’re all each other’s audience.

Something is certainly gained in all this. It means lots of people who otherwise didn’t get involved in conversations with neighbors and friends do. It means I can peer into the lives of people I never see and get a notion of what’s been going on in their lives. I can share ideas and perspectives from people around the globe and in an instant.

But it has also made the world a bit smaller. We don’t really engage outside our subscribers, people who follow us, or those people who are friends on Facebook. And we share headlines and tweets. These act as a validation  (i.e. “Take that! See the New York Times agrees with me) or provocation (i.e. posting a startling headline about a politician or celebrity) and actually don’t do much more. They may spark an argument and other articles can be cited by posting. Then there’s that moment when some heavyweight, like Mom or Alan Durning, hits like on the post. Ahhh. See.

Well, I’m already past the point that anyone is reading so it’s safe to say that I’m going to try some different things this summer. Typically I have been writing at least three, sometimes four, posts a week on this blog. I’ll keep posting here. But for the summer, say until September, I am going to try posting and writing in different venues — or not posting at all. Maybe I’ll just Tweet, something we haven’t done much of. I’m also happy to have guest posts and would welcome writing that is for or against what we typically advocate for. And if something comes together and I just have to get it out of my mind and into a post I will. It’s an effort to see if changes in format and length and content might help get our message out more effectively.

I’m doing this because the Washington Post article (did you read it?) validated what I had already been feeling: people don’t read things. They look at headlines, post, repost, like, and move on. I know this, for example, because I’ve written and said probably 1000 times that “the HALA recommendations are not the same as the Grand Bargain!” I’ve gotten likes for that and reposts and whatever. But people are still confounding the two things. And it’s not because people re stupid; rather, knowledge is sort of self limiting. We know what we know, and we kind of like to keep it that way. Finding out that things are more complicated is, well, complicated and takes time to figure out.

So today I have a post at Forbes about The Jungle which interests me from a housing perspective but also as an economic case study. Can we learn to see The Jungle, the housing encampment under I-5, as an example of what Hayek called spontaneous order? Yes, it’s a horrible place, but is it an example of innovation and shouldn’t we be figuring out how to help it along instead of squashing it? I think so. The Jungle is a response to housing need just like any other typology or form except that it is a response born of the urgency of the moment. There’s a lot to be learned about ourselves with how we respond or don’t