dubious.biz(ness)

Well, partially in line with the last post, perhaps I should post something else I’m disconnecting from. Gmail is back up, by the way, it was down for about 10 minutes, aka eternity. I don’t know how I survived.

In fact, I don’t know how I survived without all this media streaming in to my brain. I think that if our generation is know by one thing (god help me if it’s “Y”) it will be the Media Generation. I’m willing to coin that term for us, and no, it’s not the “ME-dia” generation or any other nonsense.

We’re the media generation because we’re saturated in media, I’m sitting in front of a computer, surrounded by bits of paper, some of which are full colour, some of which are pure text, there are books, posters, magazines, handouts, mail, notebooks, supervision assignments and supervision work which have fallen by gravity into a number of stacks. On my computer there ten tabs open, each one a portal into the consciousness of the world (or as you know it the Internet). Some of them have videos, some of them have spreadsheets, some have social networks, still others have my continually filling inbox and calendar.

Behind that is iTunes which has different podcast subscriptions, some of which update daily, others more than that. I run the podcasts day and night, I listen to the Global News from BBC news twice a day (an hour total) in the background, ask a ninja, “Bloomberg on the Economy” (Ask me about collateralized subprime loans!). All of it is junk. It fills my brain and I wonder why I have no room for reasonable thought. The reason is that I’m so busy taking in content and attempting to process it that there’s literally no room for my own thought.

But if all this media fills my head and drives out creativity, what is it I’m gaining? Companionship. Yup, I know this sounds weird, but with a continual stream of media, you’re never alone. And being alone is, in some ways, a beautiful thing. Not alone as in sitting on the couch watching TV but alone as in calm, still, and contemplative. It’s not emptiness like meditation, it’s just being alone, without anything to occupy your mind. I can’t say what previous generations did to occupy their time. That is the last thing that many people get.

It’s probably because a lot of people find being alone dull, and maybe that’s because they’re actually dull people, but it’s probably because they haven’t gotten enough time to appreciate the benefits of being alone.

So why the rant about the information overload? Because to put it simply, I’m overloaded. It is far easier when stressed to opt to turn on another movie, another video, another song, to tune in and drop out.

It goes beyond procrastination, although that’s what it appears to be because it is multitasking to the point of ineffectiveness. You convince yourself that you can work with the music on, then with the video on, then by juggling some light reading with the work. Next thing you know, the thing you sat down to do has been shelved and you are distracting yourself from distractions until you’re so far down the rabbit hole you can’t unwind the stack to get back up the real task you want to achieve.

Why am I not productive? What was I thinking? Oh, hey, a singing tesla coil! Damn, it stopped. More!

A final question: the economist’s razor. What is the value in productivity of this? Am I gaining more by knowing that there is a singing solid-state tesla coil than by doing some small bit of productive work for my education, job, personal life? Maybe: the singing tesla coil is very interesting, and it makes me thing about how tesla coils actually work and why they might sing and how a solid state one might be different. This increases my understanding of the world in a way similar to my academic pursuits. But the value of this extra information is tainted by risk: it may not actually be as valuable and until you know it you can’t judge it. It is also tainted by cost: the cost of thinking and carrying around the information is real. That probably answers it, the risk and costs are too high to admit information in to my brain at the expense of other less risky (but often more interesting) information.

For a week when I find myself reaching for the play button, the next link, my email… all the inlets for information, I’m going to stop. Yep, I’m going to cut myself off. Maybe not from email. I think I’d be eviscerated if I turned that off. But significantly reduced.

1. Email: once per hour, closed at all other times.
2. Calendar: always open, will notify me if something needs doing.
3. Casual Browsing: between discrete tasks when the time it takes is trackable.
4. Podcasts: unsubscribing from all but BBC World News.
5. Net videos: banned, particularly attempting to download stuff from todou which takes forever!
6. Magazines: mostly banned already, keeping what I’ve got (physics and rowing)
7. Google Reader: only once per day.
8. iPhone: not during class, even if I’m using wikipedia (must make note to check later during notes review).
9. Facebook: from email triggers or once per day checkup.

I thought I was being a bit draconian until I actually wrote it all down. Seriously. I should go on another rant about context switching but I’m so fired up I’m going to go implement rather than sit here and bitch about context switching. I’ll check in after a week to tell you how it went and inform about context switching… off to unsubscribe from all my podcasts and close my email and get back to real work (I’ll miss you email!).

For the love of internet dependency! Gmail, my single in-hole for all the crap the internet has to deliver me is currently down. And I’m extremely frustrated. I NEED EMAIL!