Television is, obviously, a drug - to be precise: a soporific. It creates a dull and continuous drone that makes its users think they are knowledgeable while they drift off into somnambulent trivia. Fortunately, TV has become so sleepy, so dull that it is ineffective and increasingly unnecessary.
Fine. But what about the web and, to be more precise again, news aggregators such as Google Reader. You may be using one of the other news aggregators but they all do the same thing: suck up your choice of the entire Internet and deliver it in one big hit list every morning. I used to scoff at the idea of the ‘personalized newspaper’; it seemed to be an odd and false concept for a public news delivery system. I agreed with McLuhan, who said that the newspaper was more a Mondrian-styled maze in which to get lost, not found. What you found in the paper newspaper was someone else’s interests, which was not all bad; it may even have been good and democratic.
But along came the web with its myriad places and along came the need (perceived, of course) to track all the sites of interest. Better to have the web delivered to my digital doorstep that to go searching. My aggregator, Google Reader, is Google-in-Reverse: my searches find me.
Like many users, I quickly ramped up my Reader habit: a few subscripted sites became a hundred, then, several hundred. Within a month, I was getting 2,000 links a day. I set aside time to look at, evaluate, sort and file the many possibly readable articles into the few that I would place in my ‘Today’ folder for actual reading. The folder bulged and my ‘Reader time’ expanded to two hours a day!
About the same time, articles began to appear from a host of dedicated bloggers (Scoble et al) expressing concern that we were caught in some kind of news aggregator time sink. It was simply taking too much time to stay on top of the news wave. To be informed was to be deformed - bent out of shape temporally!
Scoble and others suggested strategies, the most reasonable being to ruthlessly restrict your subscription list to a set number of sites that produce a realisitcally readable number of links each day. It seemed reasonable that the entire daily output of the web was worth an hour’s perusal in the morning. The solution was to cut back the Reader dosage.
At this point, for me, fate stepped in. I moved to Korea in order to teach English and, as a result, I was cut off from my dealer-Reader and I went cold turkey. At first, I felt lost, like I’d forgotten something important. Soon, however, the need to read the long list of links faded. In two months, I was established in Korea and I had time to cautiously open up Reader. I faced an hilariously huge number of links that had been faithfully delivered in my absence. I scanned them - if giving the screen a speedy glance before hitting the ‘Mark all as read’ button, can be called ’scanning’.
The interesting thing to me is discovering that I was actually interested in far less than I had signed up for. Now I am addicted again but it is to as pleasant dosage of about 20 sites. The most useful sites are those that pre-digest subjects of interest to me. For instance, Stephen Downes site gathers up pretty well everything of interest to someone wanting to blend teaching and technology. It seems to me that these ‘gathering sites’ are now even more critical in the face of info-overload.
What would be really useful would be fast forums of comment on the links gathered by experts. That way I could have access, have wide coverage but also get quick and deep insight into the selection. How can we build that into Google Reader?
