Spiral Bound

Lilia on Weblog Overload

Jonathon Delacour: Overloaded [via Edward Bilodeau]

Self-employment, a constant Internet connection, a weblog, and a mildly addictive personality turn out to be a killer combination—even for someone who no longer feels compelled to post regularly, let alone every day. Liz Lawley went cold turkey by taking a vacation with her family:

The best part of the trip was that by midweek I'd stopped blogging things in my head. I hadn't realized how much I'd begun to detach from real life, always running meta-commentary in my head to save for later blogging. Letting go of that was very refreshing. It's not that I don't want to blog, it's that I don't want to do it all the time.

Although Liz didn't say this explicitly, I think she realized that having a weblog turns information overload into a two-way process: first you suck all this stuff into your head for processing; and then you regurgitate it as weblog posts. And, while this process isn't all that different from the ways in which we manipulate information in our jobs, it's something that we've chosen to do in addition to our jobs, something that detaches us even further from "real life".

At the beginning my news aggregator was giving me the same sense of being overloaded - too many things to comment on - but then I've learnt to leave "delete after 48 hours" setting on and to let go. I've also learnt to rely on Google (if there is a good stuff, then I should be able to find it back) and on printing out (if I want to have it, I'd better have it on paper). I've learnt to select weblogs I read. And I'm conctantly trying to make blogging (at least reading other blogs) part of my job. I still feel overloaded, but now it has more to do with ideas boiling inside me than with outside flows of information.

Anyway, the original post and comments are worth reading for getting an overview of how people cope with information overload.

[Mathemagenic]