It's all about me: pushing and pulling the news

Thirty years ago newspaper journalists generally travelled to the scene of the news, then scurried back to the bustling newsroom to bash out their stories on typewriters. Type was laid out letter by letter, word by word in heavy lead, and printing presses took people and machinery power to literally roll out the news. Paper boys hurled the resulting inky volumes on doorsteps, and the whole process generated lots of jobs, lots of rubbish and lots of variety.

We still have journalists in the field, but breaking news now pops up before our impatient eyes at the click of a button or the scroll of a mouse. We can search for it, or have it delivered. It reaches us anywhere via web-enabled mobile phones and handheld computer devices. You can even get to updates from your wrist watch.

In New Zealand, stuff.co.nz and nzherald.co.nz offer news headlines by email, and nzherald.co.nz can supply news headline feeds to your own website or RSS reader. Xtramsn.co.nz provides a text message service with the latest news, sport, weather and horoscopes.

Internet bigwig Google kicked off its RSS news reader Google Reader on October 10. It promises to check your favourite sites for updates, and hand-deliver the news you're interested in. Some reviewers liked it. Most -- like Tech Crunch and Conceptual Integrity – thought it had a way to go. (Note that Tech Crunch updated their review three hours after posting it.)

There are some drawbacks of "The Daily Me" phenomenon of personalised news.

If we are hand-picking our news -- both subject and source -- it may end up one-sided and narrowly focused. We may end up sourcing purely entertainment, for example, dodging sport and current affairs.

We can end up missing out on those simple social news interactions: ambling down to the corner shop to get the paper, bumping into the lady from number 28 walking her dog, and enquiring after the shopkeeper's mother's arthritis. Life is rushed. We get to work, sit down, switch on our computer and click and flick our way through a condensed version of the day's events.

We run the risk of replacing real human faces and voices with digital ones, and not just for news. The "me" notion spills over to other areas. We already think it perfectly normal to do our banking business with a keyboard and screen and our auction wheeling and dealing with only a mouse for company.

Dr Niki Harre, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Auckland, agrees that we have traditionally tended to be in a social setting when we get our news. Sharing the newspaper at home or sitting in front of the television with family may have been superseded by solo sessions visiting internet news sites.

"I think there's a bit of a myth going round that people can become isolated," she says. "But people are such intrinsically social creatures," she says. "They'll always find a way to interact."

She says that while reading the news online may limit immediate physical discourse with others, people will often end up texting or emailing their friends to discuss the news.

But if the effects on our psychological well-being are limited, there are still physical considerations. A Sparc survey on physical activity (or lack thereof) classified 32 per cent of adults as "inactive", with around one in 10 people aged five and over considered sedentary.

Health organisations (including the Neurological Foundation of New Zealand) encourage incidental exercise - so even that trip to the lunch room to read the paper is good for you.

On the other hand, there are some great benefits of personalised news with its variety and up-to-the-minute information.

For the house-bound or disabled, the time-short, the traveller or the plain old impatient, news online is accessible to a broad range of people. Every new medium helps, and if tailor-made news takes less time to process, we'll have more time to spend on other activities.

An 18-month study by two psychologists and a communications expert into the social and psychological effects of home internet use by children found it had no adverse effects, and in fact had positive effects on their academic outcomes.

So what is the answer? Shop around – not just different publications but different media, too - and keep an open mind about the news you read and hear.

And most importantly, don't forget to get some fresh air every now and then.