I miss answering machines.

There was something wonderfully simple about coming home, seeing a blinking red light and discovering that someone had tried to reach you. You pressed a button, listened to three or four messages and then decided whether any of them deserved a return call. That was it. No robocalls offering a low-interest home equity loan I never requested. No voicemail transcription turning a perfectly ordinary message into something that sounds like evidence from a criminal trial. No notification following me around all day, insisting that someone wanted my attention.

An answering machine waited patiently until I came home. It did not expect me to be available every minute of every day.

I probably miss answering machines more than most people because I already know one will play a major role in a future book I plan to write. There is something naturally mysterious about a cryptic message left on a machine. A voice from the past. A message meant for someone else. A sentence cut off before the most important word. Modern voicemail does the same basic job, but it lacks the atmosphere. A blinking machine in a dark room is a plot device. A notification on an iPhone is just Tuesday.

I also miss phone booths, though not enough to want to stand inside one in August. I miss what they represented. You could make a call from almost anywhere, but the phone was not attached to you. You had access without being permanently accessible, and that seems increasingly valuable.

Cell phones are wonderfully convenient, but perhaps they are too convenient. There are calls we make because the phone is already in our hand that might be better made later—or not at all. Sometimes anger should have to survive the drive home. Sometimes an idea should sit quietly for an hour before becoming someone else’s problem. A phone booth required a little effort. You had to stop, find change and make a deliberate decision to place the call. Now we can call anyone immediately, which means we often do.

But the outdated technology I miss most is the printed newspaper.

That answer is probably predictable for me. Newspapers are part of my family history and my own professional history. I grew up around them. I worked for them. I still teach journalism and try to convince students that news is more than whatever appeared in the last 30 seconds of their social-media feed.

My affection for newspapers is not based only on nostalgia, though. The newspaper gave you a remarkable amount of information in one document: local news, national news, international news, politics, weather, business, sports, entertainment, opinion, comics, obituaries, classified ads, high-school scores, city council decisions, a restaurant opening across town and a war happening across the world.

Some stories mattered deeply to you. Some did not interest you at all. And some introduced you to subjects you did not even know existed.

That may be what we have lost.

We now have more information available to us than any generation in history could have imagined. With a few taps, we can find breaking news from almost anywhere in the world. We can read eyewitness accounts, watch live video and compare dozens of sources before breakfast. Yet we may be less broadly informed.

Most of us search for what already interests us. We follow the teams, politicians, celebrities, churches, controversies and hobbies we already care about. Algorithms learn our preferences and continue handing us more of the same. The newspaper did not care whether every story matched your interests. It placed the school-board report beside the baseball scores and put a foreign-policy analysis near the movie listings. You might begin by reading about the Phillies and accidentally learn something about a drought, an election or a zoning dispute.

You encountered information instead of merely requesting it.

The physical design also suggested that all of these stories belonged to the same world. That matters because our information sources now often pull us into completely different realities. Two people can live next door to each other, open their phones at the same time and receive entirely different accounts of what is happening in the country. The facts selected, the language used and the emotional tone may have almost nothing in common.

We are not simply forming different opinions about the same newspaper anymore. We are often consuming entirely different versions of reality.

And many of those versions never end.

A printed paper arrived in the morning and remained essentially the same paper all day. You could read it and finish. There might be an evening edition or a major update on television, but the news did not keep refreshing every few seconds, each headline more urgent than the last. The newspaper could wait beside your coffee. It did not vibrate in your pocket, demand that you become outraged before lunch or notice which article held your attention longest and then produce 17 more designed to make you feel exactly the same way.

Of course, newspapers were never perfect. They had biases, blind spots and errors. Editors decided what went on the front page and what was buried inside. Reporters sometimes got things wrong, and certain voices received far more attention than others.

But at their best, newspapers attempted to give an entire community a shared account of the day. We might disagree about what the stories meant, but at least we began with many of the same stories.

I do not want to surrender my cell phone, internet access or the ability to read news instantly. Modern technology is faster, easier and often more reliable than what it replaced. I just miss unfolding a paper and discovering the world beyond what I had planned to search for.

I miss seeing stories I cared about, stories I did not care about and stories I did not know enough to care about yet.

We have more information now.

I am not convinced we have more understanding.