The Hermitage 3.0 (Beta)

As you may have noticed, about half the posts on this site are of the “linkdump” variety, where I aggregate all of the cool things that I’ve stumbled upon on the web throughout the past week or two into one massively long, link-filled post. There is a very logical explanation for this. Since the start of the year, I’ve been using an RSS reader. Every day, it magically aggregates all the new stories and video clips and articles from the websites I subscribe to into one, easy to browse location. It’s great. I’ve read and watched and heard about things I never knew about, much less knew could be interesting. Unfortunately, I spend too much time reading and curating to write about much else.

I browse subscribe to far more websites than I really can handle. I currently have over 200 subscriptions on my feed and receive more than 500 articles a day. For a while, I made a valiant attempt to read everything in my subscription inbox every day. Come home from work, turn on the computer, read the news, eat dinner, read the news while eating dinner, do dishes, read more news. Easily 2 to 3 hours every evening. In the meantime, the rest of my life began to fray. Things like cleaning. Socializing. Working. Praying. Hygiene (-ing?). (OMG, just kidding!). Sure, I was entertained and informed and distracted by shiny objects, but it was having a pretty deleterious effect on what some might call “real life”.

I was drowning in information. Literally. And in my attempt to stay afloat, to stay ahead of the torrent that was crashing down atop my head, there were disconcerting changes in the nature of my efforts. There was less reading. More skimming. More blatant disregard for opinions that “weren’t worth my time”. Nuance was lost. Context disregarded. Primary sources ignored. Arguments dis/agreed with, not analyzed. TL:DR. I could feel the echo chamber starting to ring, despite the fact that I subscribed to blogs with a wide-ish range of perspectives.

Thankfully, one week I went to a conference, my inbox exploded, and I never managed to catch back up. I actively follow about 4 (non-friend) websites now, about the same number as before I started using an RSS reader. Every so often, I’ll work my way through the archives of one or two websites, but I no longer try to read everything all the time. It was unsettling at first, seeing the unread article count climb ever higher. But then it crossed 999+. And it has remained frozen there ever since: a reminder of the breadth and depth of human creativity, knowledge, and experience; a monument to the folly of trying to handle it all at once; and guidepost for when I decide to explore its wonders again.

Relevant readings:

• Nation shudders at large uninterrupted block of text. (theonion)
• Texts without context (NYT)