The Curse of Information Addiction

RSS is Rotting My Brain

I've been thinking lately about the detrimental effects that I'm suffering as a result of information overload. Over the last few months, the number of blog feeds I follow in Google Reader has been steadily creeping up, not to mention people I follow on Twitter and FriendFeed. Most notable has been the effect on my concentration span - I now seem completely incapable of focussing on anything for more than a few minutes before I suddenly find myself back on the Google Reader tab looking at what's new. It's an obsession - constantly craving that new titbit of information to feed my addiction. As Seth Godin recently said, "The internet is almost full": not physically, but the demands on our attention and our ability to take it all in are dangerously overstretched.

The symptoms are very similar to those suffered by TV addicts. A whole generation of couch potatoes is widely criticised for having the attention span of goldfish, constantly hopping from one sound bite to another as they surf the channels in search of the next fix. I enjoy the fact that where I live in London we don't own a television - instead I watch DVD boxsets of specific shows like "The West Wing" and "House". It's proven itself to be a much healthier model than just plonking myself down in front of whatever happens to be on the telly at that moment: I can proactively choose what to follow, and the fact that there's a finite amount of material available allows me to make informed decisions about how I'm going to pace myself.

A Better Way?

Some blogs really lend themselves to being read in a "DVD Boxset" manner. A favourite of mine is "Joel on Software". I arrived quite late in the day when Joel had already been writing for several years, but because he tends to post a smaller number of higher quality articles rather than blogging daily, it was still quite practical to read through his entire back catalogue from start to finish. Just like with my DVD boxsets, I've now done the same for a number of bloggers of similar style, such as Rands In Repose and Paul Graham. The other thing that these three all have in common - another by-product of their writing style - is that they've all produced books by collecting together the best of their blog posts on certain themes, making them even more analogous to the television show's DVD boxset. Now that I've begun to notice the mind-rotting effects of constanty flitting between different RSS feeds, I'm beginning to wish that I'd simply bought these books rather than reading online.

The reason that I find the appeal of Google Reader experience so enduring is that at heart I'm a busybody. I like to know what's going on in the world - what's new and exciting, what people are thinking and saying. New version of WordPress just released - great! Google Chrome out of beta - fantastic! Crummy Wifi at  the LeWeb conference - too bad! It feels like too great a cost to stop following these news sources - to be like everybody else and find out three months later when an article finally makes it to BBC news. But I'm convinced that something has to change: as Paul commands in 2 Thessalonians 3:11-12, busybodies who are idle when they should be working need to sort themselves out and get on with it!

Drastic Measures

The result of all this thinking is that I've decided to change my blog reading habbits for good.

• I'm going to narrow down the list of blogs I read regularly to the ones that are of a consistenly high standard and which I really benefit from reading.
• I'm going to favour a weekly or biweekly session of sustained reading of those blogs, rather than feeling the need to read posts the minute they're published.
• I'm going to put a premium on bloggers who collate the best of what they read online for you so that you don't have to - feeds like Robert Scoble's Shared Items or Justin Taylor's Christian blog "Between Two Worlds".
• Related to that, I'm going to carry on my habbit of reading high quality aggregation sites like Hacker News once daily and let other people do the obsessive RSS reading on my behalf.

My hope and prayer is that however painful it might feel in the short term, over the long term I'll really benefit from this change of attitude and begin to see an improvement in my ability to focus on the job at hand.

Things to ponder:

• what habbits of yours are adversely affecting your concentration?
• are there other ways to get some of the same benefits with less of a detrimental effect upon your work?
• do you think the blogs you read genuinely offer value that makes them worth following daily?
• do you find the blog posts you really enjoy reading often end up appearing on another site that you visit anyway, making it less important to read the blog directly?