Posted on February 3, 2006 at 11:24 AM in thoughts
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
Part of my job is to watch the culture of the web for things to share. I look for big trends, slow evolutionary changes, individual stories, tiny points of interest, and the occasional news bulletin. More specifically, I'm really looking for things that might matter to you if you use the web every day for work and play, or aspire to do so. I don't focus as much on business news, computernerd news, or even technology news, unless it's something that affects the culture of the internet to some significant degree. Small, funny, worthwhile pieces of homegrown content are as interesting to me as big huge new software products.
There's too much going on all the time to try to talk about all, most, or even some of it. I take in as much as I can, and each day pick one thing or group of things that I think is worth talking about.
In my writing I may mimic the relaxed, steady, and unflappable tone of some throwback tv news correspondent, but in truth it's all disheveled hair, half-drank coffees, and cluttered desktop over here.
It's strange and wonderful to have this as part of my job requirements, but it's also something of an impossible mission.
Last week there was a discussion in person and on some industry blogs after Elizabeth Lawley called Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble an "edge case" at a conference. I wasn't there, but apparently Scoble was advocating "designing tools that would optimize everyone's syndication experience so that they, too, could read 840 [RSS] feeds..." (from Lawley's blog).
As I understand it, what she meant by "edge case" was that most internet-using people aren't like Scoble and never will be. His job and his personal inclination drive him to consume insane quantities of web sites/blogs/search results/RSS feeds/e-mails every day, and it would be a mistake to design tools around his habits. You wouldn't want to if you could, because very few people in the world have the capacity and interest to eat news every day like he does.
I think Lawley raises a valid point. But I empathize with Scoble, and I'm starting to feel like a bit of an edge case myself. Part of what makes Scoble's job require so much daily reading is that the web is no longer knowable as a universe of stuff in and of itself. It once was. There are two issues at stake here. One is personal information overload, or the ability of one person to consume enough information on a given topic, and the other is the explosion of material published on the web every day in general. The amount of information has increased, but as humans our capacity to consume it has not changed all that much.
So on one side, there's the publishing glut. In the past several years, the amount of stuff published on the web every day in terms of news, entertainment, commentary, content, discussion, announcements, news about news, etc. has grown beyond the human scale for consumption. There's far more stuff to read about any individual topic each day than there is time to read it. And you don't know if it's worth reading until you're halfway through it. It's not all useful, but if you care about discovering new sources and perspectives, it's hard to avoid spending time trying out new sites. There's always the dull thump in the back of your head telling you that you might be missing something.
And on the other side, there's the human attention span and available time to work with. Because there was less to reckon with, even just three years ago I felt ok reading a half-dozen sites and/or community linklists in a day, and relying on my friends and colleagues to fill in the holes. You can probably still do that now if your focus is narrow enough and you aren't seeking to stay current day-by-day. The multiplicity of sources can be extremely helpful if you are researching a topic at one point in time, but it's become very difficult to keep up with multiple storylines as they develop day-by-day. My suspicion is that people like Scoble rely as much on one-to-one personal relationships as they do on web sources to keep up with various scenes.
I've always enjoyed the vastness of the web, but recently my sense of wonder at the vastness has been replaced by some frustration. Maybe it was always an illusion, but it used to feel more knowable. I could get my arms around it. It used to take little effort to stay up on interesting, funny, and important things, even as a hobby. Now it's near impossible, even as a job. I still find great things every day, but I can no longer say I have a daily mastery of what's out there. Who can?
A lot of writers want to blame RSS technology for this, which is a way for you to read and collect stories from multiple web sites in the same place. But the problem is really about the amount of information available, not the way that you receive it. RSS has put more information at your fingertips, but there was already too much to handle.
As Lawley rightfully suggests, this isn't necessarily a problem for most internet users, or in this case, readers. You might not want or need to keep up with anything on an everyday basis like it's your job. You don't necessarily care to be current and up-to-date on a world as big as web culture. I always did want that for myself, but maybe I'm an edge case.
I'm willing to bet, though, that the pang of information overload is something that edge cases and mainstream internet users probably share. At some point, I bet that we've all felt overwhelmed looking at search results (no matter how organized), deciding what to read and what not to read on a particular morning, or simply figuring out where to begin.
Leftovers/For further reading:
- Earlier this year AskMetafilter had a great discussion of information overload in general.
- Here's a thread from 43Folders about how to manage your news reader.
- An interesting quote I came across in poking around for sources.
Comments
Hail Earthling!
I've trimmed down my Newsgator feed count from over 1,400 down to 293 feeds. It's been a rough road, but I feel somewhat liberated from the terrible information overload. (Of course it was my own fault to begin with ...)
You raise some good points here about the human struggle to make good use of our time when there are thousands of things we could be doing (or in this case, reading/ingesting) at any given moment.
One tip I can offer for those grappling with info gluttony is to throw out the trash regularly. Clean out your inboxes and feed readers on a regular basis, and you'll breathe easier.
Posted by Easton Ellsworth | February 3, 2006 2:21 PM
Paring down is definitely good. I'm also going to try to take a step backwards and go back to looking at some of them as web sites rather than RSS feeds. Linkfilter.net, for example, is irritating as an RSS feed, but great as a web site to page through. I can't totally explain why.
I'd be interested in peeking at your OPML page at some point, to see what-all you're reading. Do you have it up somewhere?
Posted by earthling | February 3, 2006 5:17 PM
Earthling, or Dave, whatever you prefer, we've discussed this before. Personally, I think it's kind of crazy to even try to stay on top of "Web culture," whatever that is. Think of how many billions of Web pages there are out there. Of course, staying on top of it is not in my job description, so it makes sense that it's less important to me.
I haven't thought about it very much, but I wonder if people's way of using RSS feeds might have something to do with it. The problem is not that there are more pieces of content out there, though there are, it's that you are more aware of what you've missed. For example, if I hadn't read your blog for a while, God forbid, then I came back after two weeks, and everything I had previosly read had been archived, I might just scan whatever's there. Now, with RSS, I could see that I missed 508 articles. Oh my God! I have to read each one!
So certain kinds of dedicated people now have to treat the Web as one big homework assignment.
Something similar might apply to improved search results. If my search result better identify matching content, I might assume that there's suddenly more relevant content out there, when it's really the tool that's improved.
Wow, this is getting long. Please excuse me if my thoughts don't make sense, I have like 5 RSS feeds (the news thing in Safari is showing 374 unread right now. Better get crackin'!).
Posted by Jeff Durland | February 4, 2006 12:01 AM
One other thing: I think tools will develop to get ever more specialized content. Heck, you can do this to a certain extent with RSS now, instead of just getting the metafilter feed, you might get a search of metafilter for OS X posts or whatever. Unfortunately, that doesn't solve your problem, but I imagine most people work in a more circumscribed field.
Posted by Jeff Durland | February 4, 2006 12:09 AM
I still think the problem is more universal than all that. And it's not just about RSS feeds or daily web site reads, although that's one place it has impact.
Part of the answer might lie in going back to dealing with people rather than impersonal monsters like digg.com. The web used to be its own subculture, but then it grew and grew. And now, instead, you have to find and define small subcultures of your own. To me, that involves less tool-intensive searching every time you want to know something, and more seeking out experts individually, looking for small groups that know a lot about what you want to know, and making web-only friends that become your own little subculture.
Posted by earthling | February 6, 2006 5:20 PM
Gluttony is bad for you.
Think of the Web as a model of the world. Do you want to know EVERYTHING that's going on in the world?
If you're suffering from information overload, apply the same filters to the Web.
For example, the Web lets you see everyone's local newscast. The real world makes you pick one, but you get to pick your favorite. So on the Web, perhaps you don't read cnn.com *and* nytimes.com *and* news.bbc.co.uk *and* news.google.com *and* your local news Web site. Perhaps you start using my.earthlink.net and stick with it for local and national news. Or stick with something else. But trying to read everything under the sun will make you go nuts.
If you have an interest, find the best specialty site and use it exclusively, like your favorite bar.
If you want a smattering of information from a wide variety of topics, myEarthLink, Yahoo, Slashdot, Plastic, they're all there for you.
Personally, my tactic is to create a "path" to follow on the Web. I read the same sites everyday, and I probably read them in the same order. There's probably 20 of them, and they vary from http://www.defamer.com to http://www.slashdot.org
I've seen other sites, I've read other sites, just as you'll occasionally pick up a magazine you don't normally read. But I have my mainstays, and until someone introduces me to something better, I'm going to stick with them. For my own sake.
Posted by JB | February 7, 2006 12:17 PM
Who the heck is using my blog name and writing nerdy stuff on this blog...Leave my blog name off of this blog ok "JB" !!! Change your Blog name to something else (Im talking to you "JB")
Posted by JB | May 26, 2006 2:18 PM