First, The Guardian started doing it, right on my Apple Watch. The alert would come in with “In Case You Missed It” and three out of four times I had not missed it, but it was good to be reminded that this event or the other had taken place. Reminders can be effective in the digital age, where our attention is constant but frequently interrupted. It’s easy to forget.
Now, The New York Times surprises me with a full and well curated In Case You Missed it menu of stories, separated by categories, from news to features, to technology, health and entertainment.
It’s quite difficult to pretend one does not know these days, and becoming more so with each new app. The only time we used to see a “In Case You Missed It’ label in the past would be on some Sunday editions of newspapers where many editors made an effort to catch us up on “the week that was”.
Today it’s more like In Case You Missed It when it happened 15 minutes ago.
Surprises we like
As when The Guardian allowed readers to sample the first chapter of the much awaited (and recently discovered) novel by Harper Lee, author of the classic To Kill A Mockingbird.