I’ve been looking back on the amount of online content I read recently and I think I am probably like many who over-consume on a regular basis.
Technology today means we can gorge on content from the moment we wake up until we go to sleep, constantly throughout the day without hesitation; But how much of it can we actually take in? Does it reach a saturation point where we keep consuming even though our minds are full?
All you can eat information
For me personally, this information overload means that I generally cannot remember many of the things that I have read. This is because our brains are not programmed to hold lots of short-term memories.
We can use various tools to overcome this. Services like Delicious and Instapaper mean we don’t have to commit it all to memory, but it still takes an involved process to catalogue all of the content we read on a daily basis.
So what is the answer? Reduce the number of people we follow on Twitter, or RSS feeds we subscribe to? Rebalance the signal-to-noise ratio and remove some of the more superfluous things we read? Or have a system in place to catalogue online consumption for future recollection? I’m keen to hear your thoughts on the subject: You can either leave a comment below or reply to me on Twitter.
