Since I spent the weekend moving I have been unable to go online. Actually my online behavior of late can at best be called erratic. All due to the weekends activities. The tough part about this is not so much getting organised afterwards (which is terrible) but to attempt to catch up on all the reading. My inbox, rss reader and real life reading have piled up in an incredible way. This all makes me feel like Chaplin in the film “Modern Times“.
The lack of time to read is a common complaint. This is also connected to the increase in channels of information pouring in. Some of the choices are easy, while others are tough to lose for nostalgic reasons. Less or no television, skip the daily newspaper, more focused book reading, attempting to focus on one task at a time (rather than multitasking) and generally staying on top of all information flows by not allowing them to pile up.
Was it always like this? Obviously the couple of hundred feeds in my rss is new. How should one cope with the information one wants to maintain without becoming a simplified one-track person? In Republic.com Cass Sunstein writes about the daily me. This is the idea that users will tailor their information needs and ignore all “unnecessary” information. The result can be the creation of groups of outsiders who are unable to relate to their local groups.