Information Overload
Because I wasn’t getting anything truly meaningful done today…
I’ve been doing the whole “online” thing for the past 12 years. Half of my lifetime and counting further. I’ve been involved in a variety of scenes and activities. Several have threatened to eat me alive, and some came pretty close to wrecking my life. However, this is a wholly negative outlook on things, because I wouldn’t be who I am today without the Internet. Or, more specifically, spending any kind of time on the Internet continues to be a big mistake from which I keep learning the avoidable ways of wasting time.
Computers are a remarkable tool for information storage and retrieval. They are also quite complicated and fucked up to the extent that anyone who does anything creative with a computer at this point is generally wasting time or making a speculative wager.
Which brings us to blogging.
Without knowing it, I’ve been on the blog scene for about seven years. I started early in college and have proceeded to be well connected over the years. I know about hot shit before it becomes played out, which is somehow a big deal to me. Hell, I knew about blogs themselves before blogs were hot shit for becoming the underground source for hot shit… and also before blogs started recently becoming played out altogether. Over that time, I’ve been exposed to so much whining, blabbering, and drooling that it’s become a permanent part of my daily articulation.
Today’s versions of blogs are more addictive than they have ever been before. Yes, I am New York City obsessed, but generally for any topic on the planet, you can do a Google search and end up at some journal-ish site that links you to the entire blogosphere rather quickly. Unless you purposely isolate yourself from the blogosphere (which is akin to trying to avoid spam on your AOL account, or trying to hold your breath in outer space), you will be invariably cross-tied to some other site, which will be cross-tied to other sites, and so on until you reach Gawker, Slashdot, Fark, Ain’t It Cool News, or DrudgeReport. The biggest blog sites are increasingly tied into everything big and small in the world, all without truly existing in the world.
I bet you that someone can take down a million-hit-per-day independent site and it would truly affect no one except those mentally-ill enough to have linked their self-identity with that site. There will always be another site with the latest episode of Red Vs. Blue, you could always get headlines straight from Yahoo! News or Google News, you could always write your own personal memoir of your thoughts rather than post it to a discussion forum to argue it against all the other big hairy shirtless geeks. Regardless, we’ll start hearing about things like “A 28-year-old white male committed suicide in Bryant Park after failing to see either a Homestar Runner cartoon, a column from The Sports Guy Bill Simmons, or an Aaron Karo e-mail over a month’s period.” And we’ll probably read about it on Lockhart Steele and FuckedCompany.
This week’s Time Out New York… yes I did buy it and please don’t judge… has a good article on the information overload that comes with this whole Google/blog/mass-media thing. I think it’s somewhat sobering and illustrative of the false perception of information intake that we possess as a society. Cynically speaking, the Illuminati have done themselves well on this one. Our information overlords have us continually distracted by constant cable TV news zippers, In Style magazine issues the size of phone books, and an estimated 10.3 million blogs this year, of which only 4 may consist of wholly original and noteworthy content. It’s also thoroughly interesting how they keep sacrificing their own to the general public to keep us entranced. Lesser members of the elite corps, certainly, but I don’t know why they’re so desperate to keep us in line. Maybe it’s the oil.
Regardless of any intent by rich fuckers or happy accidents (if by “happy” we mean “global head-numbing”), they do have people sucked into this thing, and only more are on the way. I’ve urged myself to maintain a clear and focused mind on my life, my hobbies, and my time-management. When I start seeing any non-money-generating activity sucking all of my time away, my initial reaction is to halt it immediately until I figure out its usefulness. I’m defintiely trying to search for my true happiness, but my time is worth money and I don’t have much money. In blogging, I see a semi-useful activity that’s making me desperate for a version of daylight savings that gives me 40 extra hours per week to read all of these things. Meanwhile, I haven’t touched a book in ages, bad cases of MEGO occur for me on a nightly basis, and I still haven’t found completely effective ways to cope with my mind’s focus (as in, my complete lack of it).
But it is useful. I’ve changed my life with the information I’ve gotten off of blogs. I’m a lot less boring now. As I’ve stated here, maybe I can use my familiarity, and my inevitable future information overload, to make something for the world. It would be nice if I could pull a Nick Denton and make money off this shit. That would indeed tie back to what I said earlier about computers, the Internet, and speculative wagers. It’s not a sure thing and would need some acquired skills, but a bet based on an educated guess has a better chance of coming up a winner.
It is not the case that I am unwilling to put my ass on the line for a good idea… rather, the reality is that I have nothing to put on the line. It’s like I’m in the Bellagio with a great blackjack strategy and I’ve got only 75 cents in my pocket. I could have all the brains in the world and, sin el dinero, I’m still as useless as a guard dog with no teeth and no bark.
So the question becomes, how do I work on my bankroll without succumbing to the mental traps of the unenlightened masses - including being an unpaid hipster wannabe blogger? I am honestly unsure how to do this and keep my sanity, but I’m currently bullshitting my way through some job interviews as a start.
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Note: this was originally written and published 04/11/2004 05:39:17 PM
(yeah, holy shit, how did this NOT age except for the FuckedCompany reference?)