I’ve been thinking. A lot. And that’s all well and good on a rainy day when I can afford to procrastinate just a little bit, but when there’s Twitter and RSS feeds and email and Facebook and blogging, where do you draw the line? There’s too much to know!
This morning, I read this post which I think I came by via @timoreilly on Twitter. It’s all about how much cultural stuff there is now, and how we can never get through it all and perhaps don’t consume things with the same excitement and relish that we used to when we were younger. I have a stack of books that remain untouched and swathes of songs I’ve never listened to on my laptop – is it just greed or obsession with novelty that I’ve got so much stuff and, seemingly, so little time to enjoy it? I can blame uni, for now, for my lack of fiction reading. Laughably, the need to concentrate on using the right words for assignments keeps me from listening to music as much as I used to. But how much am I really concentrating anyway? I have nine tabs open in Firefox, four columns in TweetDeck and 859 miscellaneous unread things in my RSS reader. There’s just more stuff being produced than any of us could possibly consume and enjoy. John Boyne’s monthly reading stack positively baffles me.
Maybe most of us come with this built in urge to hop about from one thing to another, or at least those of us who spend a certain amount of time online reading other people’s words and putting our own out. Does it mean we’re just better multi-taskers? It’s not like it affects our work ethic; when there are things to do, they get done, and for the most part the flitting about is to a purpose. Ok, failblog isn’t the pinnacle of my education in publishing, but it’s a break from the few dozen newsfeeds I follow every day, and that’s alright too.
This post is reassuring. It says I’m doing it right, right? Selling your soul to the internet is the way forward.
