sygeek
Technomancer
Did You Hear We Got Osama?
By Roshan Choxi
I think I got my first computer in 2004 when I went to a boarding school in Illinois. The thing that really blew my mind about it was the unlimited amount of information that I just wished I could absorb into my brain. ”I’m going to know everything there is to know,” I told myself as I subscribed to The New York Times, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Wired, and at least a dozen other blogs on Google Reader. Politics, economics, science, whatever your choice of topic was I would never be caught uninformed.
It’s only in hindsight that I see what felt like self improvement at the time was actually the beginning of a terrible addiction. It got overwhelming really fast. I added filters, I tried a dozen different RSS readers, I even learned to speed read over the course of a few years just to keep pace with my reader. This was serious business. How would I keep up to date with the Human Genome Project and Bush’s latest folly if I started slacking on my Reader queue? Over time, I’d get better at reading quickly to the point where I was just skimming headlines. Technology would improve so I could consume news within a 140 character limit and stash the important items to “Read it Later”.
*roshfu.com/images/ConsumerWhore.jpg
My freshman year of college, Obama was running for president and the murmurings of the debt crisis had begun. Despite the 20-30 articles I consumed every day and the catch phrases I learned to repeat in front of my friends to sound knowledgable, I still had no idea what was actually going on.
I turned 18 and chose not to vote that year. I got less and less vocal about my political opinions. And, most importantly, I phased out the majority of my RSS reader. Goodbye to Wired, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Economist, and Google News. I was ready to see what would happen if I turned it all off and embraced not knowing anything about current events and the world at large.
What followed were the most productive three years of my life.
That’s when I learned an important truth about news. Whether it’s TechCrunch, The New York Times, Wired, or Fox News: their job isn’t to educate or inform you, it’s to entertain you. You’re not reading them because you think you’ll be more knowledgable and informed, you’re reading them because you want to be distracted – because consuming has a more immediate reward than creating.
Did you guys hear about the Path scandal? Did you know Kickstarter is completely changing the fundraising landscape? “That’s just tech gossip, I don’t read the gossip,” you might say. Well what about the 30 articles that come up each day about how to do do X better? It doesn’t even matter if each of those posts had a fantastic message, do you really think your reading an article can replace the deliberate effort it takes to do anything better?
Say that you somehow didn’t know we found and killed Osama Bin Laden last year, I claim that your life would be virtually the same if you did. What if you didn’t even know who the current president was? Besides for the social embarassment, would your day-to-day be any different? If you followed the news daily, when it came time to cast your ballot could you convince yourself that you’re making an informed vote and not just one based on questionable media factoids and the dogma of your closest social circle?
But this post isn’t about politics, it’s about noise. I realize there’s some irony in the medium of this message being a blog post. I’m not advocating that you pack up canned beans and a Snuggie and go off the grid, just turn down the noise in your life. I’ve gotten my sources of consumption (I don’t even call it “news” anymore) down to just HackerNews, and I probably check it twice a day on average and only read one or two posts. You may not be impressed, but for me chopping my consumption down from 50 tweets, 10 blog posts, 15 news articles, and a couple dozen Facebook posts to just two HackerNews posts took effort and time.
Give it a try. You’ll be surprised how much of the world you can tune out with no negative side effects.
It’s only in hindsight that I see what felt like self improvement at the time was actually the beginning of a terrible addiction. It got overwhelming really fast. I added filters, I tried a dozen different RSS readers, I even learned to speed read over the course of a few years just to keep pace with my reader. This was serious business. How would I keep up to date with the Human Genome Project and Bush’s latest folly if I started slacking on my Reader queue? Over time, I’d get better at reading quickly to the point where I was just skimming headlines. Technology would improve so I could consume news within a 140 character limit and stash the important items to “Read it Later”.
*roshfu.com/images/ConsumerWhore.jpg
(Image from Don Hertzfeldt's "Rejected")
My freshman year of college, Obama was running for president and the murmurings of the debt crisis had begun. Despite the 20-30 articles I consumed every day and the catch phrases I learned to repeat in front of my friends to sound knowledgable, I still had no idea what was actually going on.
I turned 18 and chose not to vote that year. I got less and less vocal about my political opinions. And, most importantly, I phased out the majority of my RSS reader. Goodbye to Wired, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Economist, and Google News. I was ready to see what would happen if I turned it all off and embraced not knowing anything about current events and the world at large.
What followed were the most productive three years of my life.
That’s when I learned an important truth about news. Whether it’s TechCrunch, The New York Times, Wired, or Fox News: their job isn’t to educate or inform you, it’s to entertain you. You’re not reading them because you think you’ll be more knowledgable and informed, you’re reading them because you want to be distracted – because consuming has a more immediate reward than creating.
Did you guys hear about the Path scandal? Did you know Kickstarter is completely changing the fundraising landscape? “That’s just tech gossip, I don’t read the gossip,” you might say. Well what about the 30 articles that come up each day about how to do do X better? It doesn’t even matter if each of those posts had a fantastic message, do you really think your reading an article can replace the deliberate effort it takes to do anything better?
Say that you somehow didn’t know we found and killed Osama Bin Laden last year, I claim that your life would be virtually the same if you did. What if you didn’t even know who the current president was? Besides for the social embarassment, would your day-to-day be any different? If you followed the news daily, when it came time to cast your ballot could you convince yourself that you’re making an informed vote and not just one based on questionable media factoids and the dogma of your closest social circle?
But this post isn’t about politics, it’s about noise. I realize there’s some irony in the medium of this message being a blog post. I’m not advocating that you pack up canned beans and a Snuggie and go off the grid, just turn down the noise in your life. I’ve gotten my sources of consumption (I don’t even call it “news” anymore) down to just HackerNews, and I probably check it twice a day on average and only read one or two posts. You may not be impressed, but for me chopping my consumption down from 50 tweets, 10 blog posts, 15 news articles, and a couple dozen Facebook posts to just two HackerNews posts took effort and time.
Give it a try. You’ll be surprised how much of the world you can tune out with no negative side effects.