Consumption

I am defined by time. "Obvious!" I hear you say. Well yes, but I would say I am more so than others. Everything I've ever done has felt bound by time. It all has to fit in. All of it. I harbour great envy for those able to maintain an attitude so laid back that they don't appear to need to tackle life, so much as slide through it. I say appear...

The proliferation of information on demand has compounded this. We receive so much stimuli that it's possible to blink and miss critical facts/opinions. How do we know they're critical? My answer: How do you not? You just missed them.

Social networking - oh how I hate that label - websites are a particular problem. They lack one thing, which for me is key to controlling the rate I absorb information. Mark as read. Those three little words, so important! Imagine having to search through your inbox every hour, trying to work out what is and isn't new.

I realise the sites likely lack this feature by design. After all, the more often you visit the site, the better for them. But it's limiting. Our brains are capable of consuming far more information than current tools allow. TweetDeck has the right idea, but if you use it to access your feeds in more than one location the system breaks. RSS is okay, but API calls become an issue and you lose so much in terms of site-specific features.

Perhaps my attitude is wrong. Perhaps every single scrap of information is not meant for every single person, but it should be damn it. We live in the future after all. I don't want to have to just dip in... For now though, I'll carry on absorbing as much as I can, praying that the things I miss don't contain moments of inspiration.