Fighting the Deluge

As I told you yesterday, I tried an experiment seeing what life was like a bit more off the grid on the weekends. Honestly, it was pretty nice. So nice, as a matter of fact, that I am trying a variant of that same experiment in my online realm.

I read a great deal of information (and I wish I had a citation for you) about the deluge of information we as internet users are faced with every day. A cornucopia of choices, each with massive amounts of information presented each day. This presents me (and I presume, internet users more generally) with many choices. First, what sources of information online do we look at, or aggregate? How do we put these together in one place? How do we “keep” things we find to be significant, or important? And, how do we filter out the things which are, as Nero Wolfe would say, “pfui,” like he does here:














http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAKjT4GizS8







For me, I added far too much to my Google Reader to be able to digest. I deleted all of my news RSS feeds and now read the New York Times on my iPad. If it’s not in the Times that morning, I probably won’t read it. I think this is how newspapers can be relevant - their curation of news events. Picking out the key and significant stories from the flummery that fills up much of the news sites on the internet.

This virtual spring cleaning extends to my email inbox as well:


See that? Nothing in my inbox. My aunt told me long ago about paper mail that you touch it once. You reply, file it, or throw it away after you open it. This is perhaps a bit utopian, but I try and apply it in my email inbox, and tends to work. However, the last few weeks have been very busy, and so mail accumulated in my inbox - requiring me to sort through the messages and deal with them appropriately. I have also been proactively unsubscribing from distribution lists, as well as postal mail catalogs.

And finally, this spring cleaning applies to Facebook as well. If you are reading this and are no longer a friend of mine on Facebook, feel free to send me another friend request. However, if you were deleted, it means we had no contact over the past year, so please do make an effort to keep in touch. This part was brought about when I was reminded about Dunbar’s Number, which I read in one of Malcolm Gladwell’s writings. Dunbar hypothesizes that we can only really “know” 150 people (or so) and so I wanted to reduce my friend list on Facebook to meet that number. I’m at 121 friends now:


So if you made “the cut” thanks for being a good friend and keeping in touch. If you didn’t, let’s try and catch up!