The speed at which information is fed to me is so fast now that news is “old” if reported only a few hours after everyone else—and admittedly, I am intimidated and challenged to update this blog with “new” content.
According to my Google Reader, TechCrunch blogged only two hours ago about Outlook being broken, but that to me was already “old” news, because I had read the same information on my Tumblr dashboard more than five hours ago, around midnight. I just checked fixoutlook again, and there are now over 10,000 tweets asking Microsoft to embrace web standards. And I just checked again—add another 100 to that number. (Did I mention that it is 5:48am here in Silicon Valley?) But apparently, all this is suuuper old news, because the 2000 vs 2010 comparison was Flickr’d seven days ago—and where was I for an entire week?!
Sometimes, I will have already read certain blog posts on their respective sites before they’ve even shown up in my Google Reader…it’s ridiculous. It’s as if I need real-time “news” dashboards open right in front of me if I want to be caught up with “current events”, and that’s sadly what my screen looks like: almost.at always takes up one tab, and TweetDeck is never closed.
Two weeks ago, my dad handed me the latest issue of Time, because he said I’d be interested in the cover story: “How Twitter Will Change The Way We Live (in 140 characters or less)”. I mean, really?! Isn’t this information two-years-old by now? So I was trying to tell my dad how he had to keep up with the news in order to be a smart stock trader, and his response was, “I do, I read so many magazines.” It’s true, he subscribes to Time, Newsweek, Businessweek, Forbes, only to name a few…yet he told me just last week how well Palm’s stocks were doing and how he should’ve listened to me six months ago when I first told him about the Pre. Go figure.
And now I’m leaving for Asia in a week, afraid of the 12-hour plane rides with no internet or the days of cheap hostel living with no wifi connections nearby. I swear, it’s a disorder. I’m not sure what to do with my iPhone when I’m going to six Asian countries within the span of a few weeks—and I’m not sure what to do without my iPhone. Sometimes, “keeping up” gets so frustrating that I just want to cut myself off from the rest of the world and take a breather—but then I get anxious without 3G or wifi.
It is now 6:25am—bedtime yet? I should probably go back and change the relative hours mentioned, because this blog post took longer than I thought, and there are now over 11,000 tweets about fixing Outlook.
Information overload.
[edit] Post-thought: how does China keep up? I remember not being able to access even Wordpress in Kunming.
Tags: almost.at, fix outlook, information overload