Try this sociology experiment

Without prejudging the outcome either way, try this little sociology experiment.

Count the number of times people ask you questions like this:

"Did you see [such-and-such happened]?"

"Did you see [so-and-so did something]?"

"Did you see..."

Also count the number of times people ask you questions like this:

"Did you read that story about [such-and-such or so-and-so]?"

"Did you read..."

"Have you read..."

Unless you have casual conversations with a lot of people all the time, you may have to run this little experiment for a few weeks. Even better, observe the ages, genders and any other interesting characteristics about the people who ask. People who work at periodicals such as newspapers probably will have to discount their findings if they're tracking people they work with.

Why should we care about this subtlety of expression? Because, I think, it's a clue. So-called water-cooler talk -- casual, real-world social interaction -- seems driven by information at the "headline" level, not in-depth. You're far less likely to find someone out there who has read the same newspaper article you did than to find someone who has noted the latest occurrence about any news or pop culture topic at a surface level.

Whole conversations happen because of nuggets of news, whether picked up from a crawl at the bottom of a cable news network, a glance at a newspaper headline, scanning RSS feeds or getting a phone call from mom. Much long-form journalism stays below the level of agenda-setter or conversation-starter until it gets boiled down to something you can "see" instead of something you (or someone in your personal social network) take time to "read."