What if one of the million blogs has been inactive for a month? No big deal! less noise in blogosphere and a bit more time for my readers to do something else.
The last two months has successively been crazy at work and off work that I hardly had anything going on in my brain to write besides the mundane things!
I wonder how the internet has changed our lives for ever. There is so so so much information out on the internet (think how easy it is to shoot an email or write a blog or send a instant message or SMS, gosh! scary) that nobody knows how to deal with it.
Someone at my work rasied this very good point to our CIO (Chief Information Officer who is responsible for information systems). He simply said ‘We don’t know how deal with so much information coming in on a daily basis, everyone has their own self-invented way of dealing with information overload…’
This really stuck me hard. I think we are hitting on something fundamental here. Most of the citizens of the knowledge economy are not trained to deal with information.
Think about this simple fact : Until about two decades ago (even now in many parts of developing countries & third world; thats another scary story!), source of information is crystal clear : Postal mail Box, News papers at the door or local coffee shop, radio/TV for many and friends/family/neighbours! Period. Just enough things to digest before dinner and have a good night’s sleep!
Today, for most of the highly organized and all disorganized, except for the few ridiculously disciplined, life is god damn so complicated when it comes to information. here goes one version of it :
Postal mail box still exists (surprise!) though we pick it up, still, once a day, yet checking email about 100 times day.
There are still lot many souls who subscribe and read news papers every morning..
We still do have our friends, family & co-workers to feed us with information that is more than enough for a human being to deal with!
And here you go into the info-highway!
“You’ve got Mail!!!”….i am guessing on an average people get about 5-10 non-junk emails a day (lets not talk about the junk emails that we spend our energy and time to clean up (even if its just clicking the link that says ’empty’, think about the value of that activity in your one and only life in this Earth!). If you include emails at work, add about 50+ on average. we are already into 27th hour of the day to humanely process the information…
Cell phone has red lights blinking….4 messages unread….
You boot your computer…Yahoo slaps you with a message….19 unread offline messages….
You fire your browser, your favorite RSS reader warns (yeah baby! they warn you, you better read them or we will never stop warning you!!!) ‘1712 new posts from 267 feeds’ [Man, How proud I am at 265 feeds!]
At work, multiple instant messages conversations, emails, phone calls, multi-tasking…putting ‘continuous partial attention’ into practice.
You start driving back from work, your XM radio tells you that 28 new stations were added from Far East with one exclusive from Al Jazeera!
Get back into home, exhausted, Cordless phone beeps relentlessly until you clear up 2 marketing messages and listen & then delete to third empty message!
Go to the living room, Tivo reminds you that you have 12 shows in your queue. [my favorite]
As you switch on your TV, the red NetFlix envelope strikes you from under the coffee table reminding ‘Crash’ has been waiting for you for two weeks now…
Just as you get sick of all this and head to the bedroom, the PDA reminds you that you have 4 bills to be paid, in full, due tomorrow, that your 401K mutual funds has gained 5% more in the last month, that the 6.20AM flight to Chicago is going to be on time, that you have not downloaded the latest version of the ‘Sudoku PowerPlay’.
I hit the bed wishing God had one extra thing on the rear bottom of my head….A shutdown button!