[…] the time and place of work has become a very important temporal and spacial location of online news consumption for a fairly large number of people who get the news online. Whereas in the case of traditional media — like print newspapers, television newscasts, radio newscasts — you would get the news before or after work, or going to and from work, but not at the time and place of work. Now, a sizable proportion of the people who get the news online get the news at work. And that has been changing how we get the news, what kind of news we get when we’re at work, and whom we talk to — the person, the people we talk to — when we talk to people about the news at work.

So, for instance, just to give you some examples, when people are at work, they tend to spend first some time, the first time that they visit the news sites during the day, or a number of news sites during the day, they tend to spend time looking at those sites in a routine, comprehensive fashion: They scan the home pages, they click on some stories, and so on and so forth. And then any subsequent visits after that are of much shorter duration, more focused on particular issues. Usually not clicking after that, just browsing on the homepage, looking at a particular story. A coworker said, “Oh, there is a big fire in this neighborhood; oh, have you looked at these poll results from that kind of competition.” People go online, check 15, 20 seconds, maybe a minute — maybe they will look at the first paragraph of the story, then they leave the site.

And the other thing that has happened is that because of the social norms of the workplace, usually it’s not well seen to have conversations with coworkers about politically, for instance, sensitive, or culturally sensitive or contentious issues. And because the people we talk to tend to influence the kinds of news that we get — sometimes to the point that we look at particular news stories because we anticipate having conversations about those stories with, in this case, the people with whom we work.

That tends to steer people away from the consumption of politically sensitive topics, and move them towards consumption of sports stories, stories celebrity stories — topics that are more innocuous, and lighter in terms of workplace conversations. And that also marks an interesting shift to people who for example work in a home environment, in a home office, versus the people who work in an office environment, with many other coworkers. The people who tend to work in an office environment, with other coworkers, and get the news online at work, tend to identify the consumption of online news with the workplace. So when they leave the office, right, because there is that symbolic association between the consumption of news and the workplace, they don’t want, when they’re at home, or it’s the weekend, they don’t want to get the news online. They’re less predisposed, because, at home, it’s not work, so they shouldn’t be doing work-related stuff. Versus the people who work in the home environment, they keep checking news sites after they finish working, right — or, at least, they have a higher chance of doing that — and also spending time looking at news during the weekend.

So these are some of the ways in which the consumption of online news at work has changed some of the habitualized, some of the routine patterns of news consumption that we have seen in traditional media. Sometimes major changes, sometimes intensifying pre-existing habits, and sometimes conforming to what we have known before. For instance, this issue that the people we talk to, the most proximate social relations, are a major factor in shaping what news we get and the kinds of things we talk about.

- Pablo Boczkowski, cited by Megan Garber in Professor Pablo Boczkowski on news consumption — and how when you read affects what you read

I used to read the paper — the paper kind — at the kitchen table years ago, in the morning. And I would talk about it with people at work, family, etc.

When I was transformed by blogging into a ‘public intellectual’ things changed. I began to read the news online, and write about nearly everything that interests me, which is a fairly broad spectrum of things. That’s why I started writing Underpaid Genius originally: to write about things that weren’t primarily about technology.

But things have blurred for me, since everything is so connected. The revolt in Libya is simultaneously about politics, social media, and food prices. Everything is connected.

And as I have progressed (or blurred) from being almost exclusively an analyst/consultant for social technologies into more of a web anthropologist and futurist, it is more sensible to talk about how everything is connected. There are no externalities: everything is a factor in the global system.

So the ‘news’ has moved to the forefront, and I consume it all as part of my ‘work’. But unlike most people, it is my ‘job’ to talk about the connections, to hypothesize the way that social networks are changing everyday life, how modern media has disrupted political discourse, and how the civil unrest of the Arab Spring and the London riots leveraged social media, but were not engendered by it.

I never back off from subjects that are contentious, but I have divided my writing into two blogs: technology and other passions. There’s a constant tension about how to write about certain topics, and sometimes I write about something at both, coming at it from tech versus policy angles.

But then I don’t have a workplace, and as a result I don’t have to share an office that is divided into Tea Partiers and progressives, like many Americans do.