"Going to the march?" he asked me.

If the old-fashioned way of getting news — three networks, the morning newspaper and (for that rarified but very vocal minority) a daily dose of "All Things Considered" — was an inch deep and a mile wide, today's acquisition process is like researching a dissertation. Instead of branching out, we burrow deep. It's like a peculiar twist on the dichotomy between Isaiah Berlin's famous concept of the fox, "who knows many things," and the hedgehog, "who knows one big thing." Even though we have ample opportunity to know a little (even a lot) about everything a search engine turns up, we tend to sift through all that information to learn more about the stuff we're already interested in. The result is that we've become a nation of hedgehogs.

This isn't the usual take on modern life. If there's any notion that culture critics hold dear, it's the idea that headlines have taken the place of stories and "analysis" is another word for pundits who walk off Sunday morning news shows in a huff. There's some truth to that, but isn't it also possible that the overload of information is gradually reprogramming our minds so that we're actually thinking deeper about a narrower range of topics?

That might explain the look of horror on my neighbor's face. As it happens, he and his wife are professional labor organizers — in other words, dedicated hedgehogs when it comes to immigration issues. And even though I've often thought of myself as a fox (good dinner party conversationalist, miserable academic), it was only then, standing in my yard in my bathrobe and feeling like the neighborhood numskull, that I realized I'm a hedgehog too.

If he'd asked me about German cinema, I would have knocked his socks off (of course, 500,000 people don't show up at German film festivals). As it is, I'm still trying to get over my embarrassment. I never thought I'd say this, but maybe it's time we all got in touch with our inner fox — at least a little. Hedgehogs may be brainier in the strict sense, but it's hard to squeeze those prickly spines into a "Unite Now" T-shirt.