Hey hello! Long time now post!

To tell you the truth, I think my blogging ship has sailed. Well, with pretty much everybody and their dog having a blog, I thought it had, which is why haven’t really made the time to post anything.

Another reason you have not heard from me is because I’ve been recovering from a bit of “Information Shell Shock”:http://thinkingmachine.blogsome.com/2005/03/16/all-in-the-mind. Keeping up with all the latest news, staying on top of all the blogs, staying up to date with all the forums, etc was just too much. But it turns out that I was not the only one feeling a bit stressed out.

Om Malik “comments on the problem”:http://gigaom.com/2005/11/01/the-economics-of-attention-crisis:

bq. Fred has picked up the thread for the “looming attention crisis”:http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2005/11/the_looming_att.html, something I have written in “the past”:http://gigaom.com/2005/04/08/internet-anxiety-disorder-anyone/, extensively. Fred talks about the number of RSS feeds and how they slowly start to become feed-creep.

This is by no means a new problem. Science has seen this coming for a long time now. Tools like RSS, “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us, etc by streamlining access to information have just gone and made the problem, inadvertently, a whole lot worse.

Slashdot has “chewed through”:http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/30/1355253&tid=187 a very good article discussing the issue. The Slashdot post and the article are both worthwile reading. Here’s a short quote from the article, “Life Interupted”:http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/pacificnw/2004/1128/cover.html:

bq. We’re shooting through technological rapids that have opened doors and changed the dynamic of work, how we communicate and live, and sometimes even think. All these tools have made our lives easier in many ways. But they’re also stirring deep unease. Some are concerned that the need for speed is shrinking our attention spans, prompting our search for answers to take the mile-wide-but-inch-deep route and settling us into a rhythm of constant interruption in which deadlines are relentless and tasks are never quite finished.

Matt Webb, however, is moving in the “right direction”:http://interconnected.org/home/2005/10/02/attenuation_is as far as a solution is concerned:

bq. Any time you have to make a choice about anything is a time when you need to “attenuate”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenuate, and maybe you could externalise that method of choice into the system itself.

One of the other reason I have not had time to post is because I’ve been reading Marshall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262631598/102-4024198-7887363?v=glance&n=283155&v=glance. The book is simply breathtaking. I consistently have to remind myself that it was written 40 years ago, long before the advent of the internet. I still think it’s applicable to our Information Anxiety problems.

bq. This book explores how we as humans define ourselves through our technologies and make them an extension of ourselves. McLuhan looks at media in particular as an extension of Man and this book explores some of the main extensions and their social and psychological consequences.

And one of the consequences that he points to is this situation we find ourselves in. But instead of people just trying to hit the brakes on progress we need to release that we got ourselves into this position. So for better or worse, we need to figure out how to deal with it…