It took awhile for me to realize the full suite of services Google had available even after I had signed up for Gmail, which was my initial entry-point. Next it was Google Calendar, then Google Docs, Google Alerts and, finally, Google Reader.
(Clearly I'm late to the party on RSS feeds, but please, humor me for a moment. If you're feeling generous, perhaps humor me for the entire post.)
RSS is really an astounding way to keep abreast (heh, abreast) of information of all sorts. I've got my major news outlets, my Deal Alerts (in case, for some reason, I develop disposable income), enthusiast websites, my favorite blogs... one would think it would be an information overload. And in a way it is; there's no way you could ever read all of this material and still find time to bathe in the morning. The beauty, then, is how this information is summarized and displayed in snippets of text, a sea of fortune cookie messages for you to browse and cherry-pick.
I'm giving this more thought than I might normally because I went to an MIT museum event that was centered around social networking and the increasing rapidity with which information technology is created and assimilated into the culture; unfortunately, what I walked away with was a sense of unease more than anything else. There's something kind of scary about consuming media at that rate; whenever I load up Reader I get a sense of being Ozymandias, watching the world on his wall. Admit this: Eminently skimmable and completely customizable, feed readers are clearly the direction that technology and society are headed, in terms of how we digest information. It's not beyond the realm of possibility to think that in 20 years the DSM won't even recognize ADD as a disorder; instead, constant, thought-obliterating multi-tasking and info-skimming will be cultural survival skills. Our kids will grow up hearing voices, not because they're schizophrenic, but because they're constantly plugged into the rolling, shouting, voice-aggregate of the web (which I'm now contributing to with this blog! Oh noes, the caucophany!)
Alarmist, I know. But you have to wonder how things will turn out as information technology propels us towards post-history. I will say this, though: Whatever else may terrify and bewilder my 85-year-old future self, I'm going to rock the videogames. Silver lining, people!
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