Time to Cut the Crap

Hunger for knowledge can be a dangerous thing, something which I'm realising as the days pass by. Internet is a heavenly gift for the info-hungry people like me who need to read to satiate their soul. Conversely, the problem with the internet is that there's too much information, and it's difficult to determine which data is valuable.

The social media revolution makes it all too hard to digest the superabundant information being fed to us. There is no dearth of knowledge u seek, and will be less so, as social media gets integrated in every part of our lives. To escape it then would be simply not possible , but to keep a tab on your urge and appetite is surely under your control.

I am simply addicted to information. I don't care if it's ever going to help me in real-life, I spend time clicking-through the infinite inter-linked webpages spread across the world wide web. I seek to assuage my hunger, but on the contrary, every new read links me to another piece, and before I know I'm entangled in that big world wide web of information. Over the past few months with more frequent usage of RSS and twitter, data aggregation and management has become quite easy, but has made living worse for me. I can see hundreds of unread 'stories' on my RSS reader, an unending list of tweets I haven't read, most of which lead me to a new link with a new website (and god forbid if that website has somewhat good/interesting content, it gets added to my list of blogs to be followed). Sheesh! A bigger dump every day; where to store it all? Plus, I have stumble upon, which is another universe in itself. Then, I have daily digg newsletters, a few more newsletters from a few business and tech sites, WordSmith's AWAD, ZDnet's newsletter, Netvibes, jimmyr, torrentfreak and what not. There's TechCrunch and Lifehacker , something I can't miss for a single day. So, as you see it is simply impossible to manage all that in a single day( and still keep sanity) unless you make your living out of it( I so wish I could!).

Consequently, I'm now trying to sift through all the news and give a mere quick-look at everything, saving the precious reading time for the interesting and important few. It is harder than it seems, as you know one can't judge a book by its cover always. So it's difficult to tell a garbage pit from a mine with a simple glance. But, I'll get better with time. Practice will make this man perfect.