when we started command-f, i had this unspoken promise to myself that i’d never post anything new until i’d read, pondered, and (ideally) responded to prior posts from anne-marie and caleb.  well, consider this a broken promise.  i read but haven’t yet pondered caleb’s last couple posts and i haven’t even read anne-marie’s post from yesterday yet.  And what i have to say isn’t even particularly pressing but here goes…

i’ve never made new years resolutions.  i have a new years eve tradition of writing down all the crap from the previous year that i’d like to let go of and burning the paper.  conceptually i like the idea of starting a new year cleansed of the past year’s ills better than starting it loaded up with pressure and expectations.  this method is kinder for neurotic people like me.  That said, i made two - related - resolutions this year:

1. Spend more time being creative, including writing on my blogs (there’s one you don’t even know about!  because i never write on it!)
2. Waste less time online

These are related both because they have to do with how i’m spending my limited hours during this, my one life.  But they are also related because there’s actually a tension there that arises from how i spend my time online.  There are a lot of ways to waste time online and my particular poison is…reading.  i want to read it all.  i want to follow every link.  oh, now i’m interested in that.  i want to learn everything about that.  oh, that’s related in some tangential way to this other thing, i want to immerse myself in this other thing.  i want to be inspired, i want to feel those connections sparking.  i want to read some library blog and relate it to this other lawyer blog and connect that to some open source message board and see how thats actually connected to the craft blogs and start to trick myself into believing i’m getting a handle on it.  And there’s certainly nothing wrong with that.  That’s me.  I’ve got a restless, floozy brain — travelling around, falling in love all over the place.  And all this reading is the well from which i draw inspiration for any creative endeavor I might undertake, especially writing.  But at some point this past year it stopped being inspiring and became unmanagable for me.  I could feel the weight of unexplored, unpondered, unknown, unloved information pressing down on me.  Constantly.  So what the hell happened?

I blame Google Reader.

When I first started using RSS it was with Sage, the excellent Firefox extension.  It lived in my browser.  On the surface, this seems like a bad thing.  I want to be able to access my feeds where ever I am, right?   In practice, though, it enforced a useful constraint.  On my work computer I had all my library, other academic, copyright, culture, etc feeds.  I’d read those feeds for a few minutes with my coffee each morning and when I needed a little breather from whatever work I was working on in my office.   At home, I had cooking, crafting, running/fitness, humor, etc.  I’d look at those in the morning before my workout, maybe have a glance at them when i was checking my email. I loved Sage.  It worked so well for me.

But I was tempted.  Goddamn Google Reader.  With its sharing.  Its damned tempting sharing.  So that’s how it started.  I wanted to be able to use that sharing feature.  And, don’t get me wrong, I freakin’ love it.  But it had consequences.  That enforced separation of my interests gone, all the information was coming at me at all times.  Also?  Those unread counts…stressed.  me.  out.  Must.  Read.  It.  All.

So…time for some self-control:

1. Turned off the unread counts (thank you, Google)
2. Unsubscribed from more than half the feeds - stuff I never read despite best intentions, stuff that I liked but that just had too much stuff, blogs that mostly just reposted stuff from other blogs I already read.
3. No more reading “work” blogs at home.  Return to reading work stuff at work.

I think I’m also going to set a little alarm on my computer at home that makes me check in with myself every 15 minutes or so, I don’t want any more of those evenings where I open the computer to look up the recipe for a corpse reviver #2 and enter some fugue state only to awaken two hours later with 40 firefox tabs open, completely stressed out, no more informed, without a cocktail.

When I was teaching DTC 356 at WSUV, we spent a lot of time talking about how the tools for delivering, storing, saving information affect society and culture.  It’s funny to me how little time I spent with the students on how these same things affect individuals.  I’m certain lots of other things besides switching RSS readers contributed to the changes in my information use (changing jobs, for one) but I’m confident that the switch to Google Reader radically altered my relationship with my RSS feeds and, hence, with the web.  Its nice to be resensitized to this.  Now…i’m going to set aside some time to read and mull over my friends’ posts…