Overload .. Reset .. Reboot.
Dec 08
If absence makes the heart grow fond, you guys and girls must
be screaming for my return right now. I know. My hiatus in Blogging and
contributing to the web has been going on for too long. The sweet irony
of the thing is : It where extreme demands on my time and attention by
‘other parties’ that ledd to the idea of producing "KC005 : Superhero
syndrome" about how geeks like us can survive in a world of N00bs.
Kicker is that due to my agenda being overbooked, even the release of
that very podcast got delayed by almost a week. (and I don’t talk
production, i talk about having the time to put it together and upload
the fucker). Irony : A podcast about how to "shield your time" from
demands from end users has been delayed by just that.
Enough of this rhetorical blabber. I
sit here in front of my keyboard in what is becoming my first " Deep
core" session in months. A "deep core session" is what i call a night
of "tinkering with the computer". After my wife cat and dog have gone
to bed, I stay behind the computer, put my headphones on and start
meddling away in cyberspace. Undisturbed by the sounds of everyday
life, unhindered by television, cellphone or instant messaging. A time
for my system to experience peaks in processor load and saturation of
bandwidth. Where you would think this is a busy time for me ? This is
in fact very relaxing. Listening to Vangelis’s 1942 (A cd I bought
almost 15 years ago) and enjoying some mineral water. A moment to
contemplate life on the edge of real and cyberspace.
One of my observations this week have been that Podcasts can make you depressed.
No seriously. I spend a lot of time on the road and have quite a bit of
time to listen to podcast. I’ll chow through 4 or 5 episodes a day on a
variety of topics, but most of the things I listen to are tech related.
Yet whenever I’m listening to yet another podcast, I sometimes get
overtaken by a sense of melancholic frustration. Although i’m so tuned
in into what’s going on in Cyberspace, I get the feeling I’m missing
out on things. Most technological podcasts give you tips and tricks and
links to websites. They talk about Twitter and second life. An
meanwhile little me is @ work or driving in the car with no access to
the keyboard, nor having the time to explore all these fantastic
suggestions in the upcoming hours. I get home and feel frustrated. If I
could I would just dive behind the computer and re-emerge the following
day, having visited all the websites, downloaded all the applications,
and having tried and memorized all the tips that I heard on the
podcasts. Not to mention that I had visited all the places in second
life and twittered every breath I took. Waking up to reality and facing
the fact this is impossible.. gets me down sometimes.
Not being able to do this (due to the enormous amount of
information offered on the one hand, and due to the fact I have a "real
life" that demands my attention) amounts into a feeling of frustration
and loss. Frustrated because you can’t put this enormous amount of
audio information into practice, and a feeling of loss because you feel
like you are missing out on so much more. Since the explosion of the
web 2.0 a few years ago the sheer volume of f information coming at me
has become impossible to process. And the question is .. What do we do
about it.
Do we miss out ? : So many feeds, so many
podcast episodes, so many websites. Even if we filter everything out
into a distilled feed, we cannot help but lie awake at night..
Wondering what we are missing out on. To choose is to loose. It is as
simple as that. I wish I could be twittering every breath I took, Wish
I could spend my days like Calliie Lewis, living the geeks dream. I
would even be pleased if I could put every article on Lifehacker.com
into practice. But the more we filter .. the more we miss out on.
Do we hyper focus ?
: Choosing is losing, but still : If we choose one field of interest
and dive deep into its murky depths .. immersing us with this
vertically aligned content. Becoming an expert at our narrow chosen
field of interest. But how deep do we dive. Where do we draw the line.
Or do you "win some loose some"
At the end of the week, some podcasts remain "not played" on my Ipod,
Some links in my RSS reader stand out in their bold-printed unread
virginity. Do we accept the fact that we can"t have it all ? That we
can’t drink the entire stream but should be satisfied with the sips we
get from the well ?
Lets face it . Even if we had no job,
no "real life" and would be able to spend our days online all the time.
Even then we would miss out. There is too much to process even for
those who have the time. We must not forget. When we listen to
podcasters, read bloggers and think : Whow .. I wish I had the
time/knowledge he or she has .. He or She is probably thinking the same
thing about everybody else. The bottom line is that there is never
enough time. And that there is no end to the information that we can
access. In abundance of information we find the poverty of being only
human..
