I think I need to go on an information diet. Every morning, I wake up and check my Gmail. I dive first into personal correspondence, and then pick or delete the various Facebook event invites.
Then there’s my scroll through Twitpic breakfast snaps and bit.ly-shortened news linked tweets, my Facebook status feed and my Tumblr dashboard and — oh, don’t even get me started on how many Firefox tabs are open by now.
As you can tell, I worry that I’m a bloated, attention-deficit info junkie who’ll often choose the latest Kelis music video over an in-depth analysis on the Afghan detainee issue.
I got thinking about this after reading a Mashable.com article on social media stress. Writer Soren Gordhamer (job title: Silicon Valley Wisdom 2.0 Summit organizer) offered four tips on cutting back the stress 2.0. His practical advice — disconnect, take deep breaths and eat healthy foods — was possibility discounted by his “Apps to Live By” recommendations: Work that body and download iPractice, a $2.99 Yoga Journal iPhone app for a how-to-Sun-Salutation lesson.
Do I really need a smartphone’s alarm ping for “om” reminders? It’s a Catch-22 situation for our digitally-augmented lives: In order to streamline my information diet, I don’t need to exactly lower my intake, but just rely on the aggregation. Replace keyword searches with social bookmarking sites. Trust the status update search engine that is my Facebook network.
But then again, it was thanks to a linking Tumblr posting that I speedily-then-stopped-to-re-read a 2009 SantaCruz.com article by Paul M. Davis praising “slow reading” and a re-assessment of our “power user” statuses.
“No matter the media, we need to rediscover the discipline of slow reading that has been lost in the frenzy of never-ending RSS feeds and social network life streams,” Davis concludes. “It is, as it’s always been, essential for us to read slowly, be engaged with what we read, to constantly challenge ourselves to re-learn how to think, to be critically engaged.”
So until our brains become totally rewired, I guess Mashable’s onto something with the deep breaths. Did I mention Gordhamer’s conclusion? “Learn to surf.” I’m not sure what that entails, but I’d like to figure it out (on my own).
I think I need to go on an information diet
You know that Socialite has a blog, right? Everyday, I curate link round-up the latest updates on the on/offline tip, as well as offer meta-sneaks into my weekly column. Starting today, I’ll be attempting to ‘Serenity now!’ on stress 2.0 by sharing ways in which to cut back on the daily online information intake. If you can bear to another subscription in your RSS reader, please add http://socialite.posterous.com.
Rea McNamara writes about the on/offline statuses of niches and subcultures. Follow her on Twitter @reeraw.
