Information Anxiety

Image credit: TomNatt

Recently, I tasted information anxiety (hence no post for the past 3 months), caused by the continuous onslaught of articles, links, and updates from all over internet. This river of news can be personalised by using a RSS reader to harvest gems from blogs, social bookmarking sites, news portals, and other websites (I use Google Reader).

The upside is time saved, as you just need to visit one place for all the latest information from as many sites as you want. The downside is attention crash.

I shared Post-Punk Nerd’s lament at how his online habits caused him to read and reflect less often:

My use of the internet is, it turns out, abuse. I have traded away my brooding study in exchange for an all encompassing buckshot of skim reading, estimation, and chiding. I have not got very much to say anymore, but very many topics on which I feel required to speak. In high school I would spend whatever money I had ordering books, and I would wile away an entire weekend dissecting Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread. Now I struggle to get through an abridged edition of Marx’s Capital, and I spend no more than fifteen minutes on it at a time before I go running for my RSS Reader to see if XKCD updated. In my youth I spent time writing epic (and awful, as most youthful writing is) novels on reams of loose leaf paper. These days I have to force myself to sit down and drag a short story to a conclusion, if I get that far.

Clay Burell, at his Beyond School’s post, offered some insights into the nature of online reading:

Maybe it’s the daily “fast reading”: the Google Reader, the Stumbling Upon, the one-inch “Digging” and consumption of the latest hi-calorie Delicious thing.

But let’s be fair. These “filtered” publishings we daily (hourly, secondly) consume are often of high quality and high value. The problem comes in the fact that, taken together, they are disjointed, fragmentary, somewhat random, and almost always “contemporaneous” and “immediate” - connected to the day or the year, but by no means the longer river of time. And that makes our thoughts more like mayflies flitting on that river than old growths towering beside it.

Elsewhere, online literacy has been criticised to be a lesser form of reading. Anyway, there is only so much my attention can take. The solution is straightforward, but not easy. That is, to get out of the river. After all, the river of news coming at me is self-created.