Feb
24
Diminishing e-turns
Filed Under Technology
For the past four months, my main job included taking care of the boy a few days a week and catching up on episodes of Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, and Torchwood. And keeping up with the Internet.
So I started a new job this week and found myself effectively unplugged. Without realizing it, I’d come to dread the daily trudge through my ever-growing list of RSS feeds. There is some truly interesting writing and insight online. But there is also a lot of recursive linking and repetitive information. I probably wouldn’t read an article about thirteen ways to show Facebook contacts in the Windows Vista sidebar. I definitely don’t want to see the same link on four different sites.
After a few days off the Interweb, I felt refreshed. Liberated. Much better. Better enough, in fact, to venture back online to see what I missed. I opened up Google Reader and found I just wasn’t interested. The spell had been broken.
The saying goes that a project will expand to fill out the time allotted. For me, I’ve found that without Real Work, I’ll fill that node of my productivity with trying capture a ton of online content. I like the fact that I can keep learning things about myself–even if it’s not positive.
I dug a little deeper over the weekend. I had a bookmarks folder entitled “Good Reads” for a bunch of blogs that I had found interesting, but not compelling enough to add to my RSS feeds. I started poking through this list a bit and found a series of snapshots of my online life. I could remember what had drawn me to each site, what particular project or hobby had put the site on my radar. And I could also remember exactly why I wasn’t interested in these subjects any longer.
There are a few things going on here that make me think the web is starting to evolve a bit. We’ve had an explosion of voices online thanks to all the well-equipped publishing tools. Everyone has a venue for their opinions, and everyone has a choice for inputs other than mainstream media. Myself included. But perhaps the novelty may be wearing off. I can imagine how other may be experiencing the same fatigue under the burden of all this content. Maybe the whole thing will collapse. Or maybe a few strong voices will emerge, effectively becoming the mainstream of the web.
Regardless, it’s a true first world problem when we need a word for those sites we find interesting, but not interesting enough to add to our RSS feeds.
Or maybe it’s just winter in Ohio and I’m ready to go outside.
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