I remember the time, when I was little, when there was no Internet. All my generalist knowledge about the world came from two sources: my parents, and an encyclopedia we had at the house. In a way, the encyclopedia was like the Internet (combined with Yellow Pages). If I needed to draw a picture of a bird, I browsed the encyclopedia for images of birds. If I was bored, I’d open the encyclopedia on a random page.
I think that spending all of elementary school and a part of middle school like that made me appreciate information. I think it is the case that my generation pays closer attention to the quality of information, intuitively comparing what they see to what they would see in an encyclopedia. And I think we are better at finding the more obscure information (since search was linear–no index–I had to be clever about what I looked for). But, on the other hand, we’re probably struggling more with the amount of information (unless we’ve stayed on top of it by following the trend for all these years–still, if I really want to be up to speed I feel the need to read about 200 blog posts every day while back in the day it was a few pages in a newspaper).
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Hearing that you need to read 200 blog posts makes me a little nervous. Your information diet is just like your nutritional one; you want to make sure you aren’t over eating, and that you are eating well.
I recently cut e-mail checking to once a day. In doing so I got the distance necessary to better understand why I check my email. I usually do it for social validation (I have mail; I exist in the eyes of other people) or simple procrastination (this line of code is hard; maybe I have mail?).
It also had the side effect of slowing down my article reading (many of my articles come from friends). I then realized that I read blog posts for more reasons than just being kept up to date. I do it also as something to talk about (it becomes a discussion point with friends), I do it to feel/seem interesting and smarter and I do it as a sort of wandering/discovery act.
I read just one article yesterday. But it totally stuck. And I really pondered it’s implication.
I think you picked up on the wrong thing here, but I appreciate your concern. I also didn’t really explain this point well…
I don’t read 200 blog posts but I do give myself an option to read them. I pick according to some heuristic that I don’t understand (and that I don’t care to understand); I’d call it more gaining exposure to absorbing information (because the latter should rarely be the objective).
You are right, I want to make sure I’m not over-eating, but I do want to make sure I diversify my food sources.