The eOK .network

I never thought I’d say this, but I think I’ve hit the brick wall of information overload. I feel that I’m learning a lot less because I’m consuming more; and all this thanks to Web 2.0 apps and the social media.

I remember as recent as 5 years back, the Internet was simply made up of pull medium (the world wide web) and push medium (email, chat, IM). Navigating the web was a process of discovery with search engines being the main start point with your favourite sites saved as manageable bookmarks.

Even as recent as the start of the Web 2.0 boom and the social media craze, all I read was Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch and Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion via feedburner’s RSS to email. That was it. That was all the information I needed.

Then came Google Reader, the only RSS reader that I actually enjoyed using. I liked it so much that today I have 104 feeds subscribed and I find it impossible to keep up. I’m already better than most since I read my feeds on the computer when at work or home, and on my mobile while commuting. But still, I can’t keep up. And to make matters worse, I can’t remember what I’m reading.

What RSS and Google Reader has done is turn the social media into a push medium. And I’m starting to think that’s a problem. Firstly, by pushing an overload of information down to me from my “favourite” blogs / sites, I feel that I’m compelled to consume these top media before embarking on new discoveries. But this consumption never ends. I never see the bottom of the bowl.

Not having the time to surf the web as I once did is bad enough, but to add on to that, the lack of discovery and focus is making me take the information for granted. Information being pushed down from my feeds can be fun and interesting at the moment of my reading, but because of the consistent flow of diverse information, I feel that I can’t remember what I’ve just read. Think about it this way: If you were reading a book on say vial marketing, and a week after you’ve read the book I ask you what was the book about, you’ll be able to tell me the gist of it at least. Now if I ask you what you’ve learned from the blogs you just read last week, you’d find it tough to piece it all together simply because its not something consistent or something you’re focused on. Just too much random information which you may or may not be interested in.

Then there’s the “flattening effect”. It’s the same problem we see when there’s too much email at work. Because every email and every feed post is merely a line item in a database, it does away with a very important human element: preference. A computer doesn’t know that I prefer TechCrunch and Micro Persuasion above the rest of the 102 feeds, it just flattens them all out as if they are of equal standing. This has been a problem with email for the longest time. Sometimes at work I get 100s of emails and how would you know which are important and which are not? Is this the curse of the push medium?

Apart from feed readers, I’m starting to rethink social bookmarking too. In the past I would have folders on my bookmark bar that were labeled Tech News and in there would be sites like The Register, News.com, TechWeb, etc, and it mattered that I check with these sites from time to time. Now on del.icio.us, I find that I’m bookmarking and leaving it there. It’s almost like I’m bookmarking not for myself but for others to find it. That’s not a bad thing in itself, but how often do I check back with sites I’ve bookmarked and wish to return to? Hardly ever because they get pushed down the conveyor belt of bookmarks and get lost in the tag cloud only to be discovered by search or accident.

So doing all these reading, bookmarking, and other social media things powered by Web 2.0 technology is leaving me with very little time to get out there and discover. Sometimes I feel tempted to stumble on StumbleUpon, but in the back of my mind I know there’s so much “premium” content left on my feed reader to consume. Hmm… are they really premium? Or am I just giving in to preconception?

On June 17, Steve Rubel posted on twitter:

Dumped a ton of RSS feeds to focus on what’s important. Time and attention are scarce resources that must be obeyed.

I think it’s time I do the same.