I love the Internet, I do, I really do, but it wears me out.
I have more RSS feeds in my feedreader than I have time to read, and I come across more every day that interest me. The Internet is absolutely fatal to anyone with wide-ranging interests: it’s so easy to overdo the information influx and become dazed and bewildered by it all. The thoughts of a billion brains is not meant to fit into one head, after all.
The trouble is, the Internet has become like a giant distributed brain with all its thoughts available to read whenever you choose. If you are interested in almost everything, then there’s so much to read, so much to think about, and it becomes really difficult to have any thought processes left to deal with everyday life.
We are so tremendously lucky to live in an age where we are getting closer and closer to having the sum of human knowledge a mouse-click away. No matter what the subject, you can find information about it. It becomes really easy to become a relentless consumer of information, retrieving snippets from all over the globe without moving from your chair. But I’m not sure that’s a healthy habit to get into. It’s very easy to become mentally exhausted just trying to absorb and process it all.
The sheer volume of information, thoughts, opinions, essays, comments etc that is out there is terrifying. I have many feeds in my RSS reader that I think I should read, either because they will help me become a better person, or will keep me up to date with technology, or just keep me posted about what’s happening in web development. I’ll confess right now – I hardly touch those feeds. I just can’t take it all in.
I don’t really know what the answer is – as a nerd I do have a need to attempt to keep up with what all the other nerds are up to, but at the same time, there are just too many of them, and they are all talking at once..
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