Information Overload

Jul 29

consciousness, hyper reality, information 2 Comments

My RSS reader has over 1,000 unread items. My inbox is never down to 0. I’ve got stacks of books I’ve been meaning to read. TV shows I need to watch, bands I need to listen to.

Doctor, doctor, I think I’m suffering from information overload – there’s too much data and not enough time to sort and analyze. The constant stream of status updates, tweets and ticker feeds are bombarding my senses. It’s like I’m standing at the bottom of a waterfall with a paper cup, vainly trying to fill it up.

Reminds me of Blur’s Out of Time chorus:

And you’ve been so busy lately
That you haven’t found the time
To open up your mind
And watch the world spinning gently out of time

Worry not though, there’s a breath of fresh air out there, and it actually comes from my twitter feed. It’s the people I follow who tweet once in a while, once every 2 weeks at most. And it’s usually an update letting me know where they’re going to be, what they intend to do. No sharing of links, no snarky commentary, no self-advertisements.

More of that would be nice. So would shutting off my data stream tap. But I’m too addicted to the ebb and flow of information – I’m a proud card-carrying member of the 21st century hyper-reality meta-nation called the Internet.