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These days, it's easy to get deep details and hard to find the basics

I went to bed last night reminding myself to DVR the royal wedding for my wife on Saturday morning and check what time the NFL draft started later on Saturday afternoon. I woke up, of course, to find that the wedding was this morning and the draft started last night. I joked to a friend that at least my ignorance is well-rounded.

When I realized how off I was on these, though, the first thing that jumped to mind was how did I miss that? For at least a month, I've been bombarded with columns, opinions, excitement and mock drafts (only for the NFL...didn't see any wedding mock drafts), and yet nowhere in that information was anything about "tonight" or "tomorrow".

It's a strange effect of our current connected world: it's easy to get details and debate, but it's often hard to get the basics. I was at a conference for a few days last year and was out of touch on news, and when I came back, I was hearing tons about Derek Jeter and Christine O'Donnell. I could find tons of columns and deep analysis on both of them, but I couldn't find out for the life of me why people were suddenly talking about them. Derek Jeter had "cheated", but I couldn't find out how and Christine O'Donnell...well, a lot of people had opinions on her, but it took me a surprisingly long time to out who she was or what she had done in the past few days to suddenly warrant so much attention.

The internet certainly isn't at a loss for depth. We can find anything we want at anytime. But in the constant blizzard of statuses and tweets, it's amazing how often and how quickly the basics of a matter get lost.

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