The assignment for this week: to stop one of the information feed s that one has been relying on for more than 24 hours, and to report on what happened. A tough quest, I must say, for a serious information addict like me.
The first thing to do was to select which feed to cut off. But what is a feed? it is not simply information per se, but information that is selected and given to me, according to what the feeders argue to be the things that I want. Thus, it is not what I actually search for, but what I am supposed to long for. Of course it is not something that is one-sidedly, but an analysis based on the information of my taste that I have given them - or at least left traces on their system. A feed is something that I have taken part in, more or less voluntarily. Let's think what kinds of such feeds I have on my daily basis... email, that's for sure. An email account for personal matters from Korea, one for personal matters from US, one for academic stuff. Then there's the news syndication feed. Google news for international news, Naver news for Korean ones. And there are at least a dozen blogs I visit everyday. Since I enjoy browsing around, I don't use my RSS reader often - but this is still a kind of regular information feed for my way of living. Amazon, Ebay and all the other stores that provide me with personalized 'choices'. It's not that I buy from them everyday, but it is a nice entertainment just to browse around what the stores and people have to offer, a kind of cyber eye-shopping. Also part of my daily routine.
Okay, back to the task... which one should I cut off? First, I cut off the Google News. But after a couple of hours, it made no sense. If I cut off one feed, there are always so many alternative feeds. Yahoo news, for example. Cut off all kinds of Internet newsfeeds? there is still the vast array daily newspaper that can be red in the Journalism Reading Room. And, there's the TV. It is not a single feed, but the whole media sphere of information feeds that one is dependent on. My first lesson.
How about feeds that have less alternatives, say Amazon? Yes, NOT visiting Amazon made me feel uncomfortable the first day. Then, it sent me an email with the list in it. I deleted it. Now, an email from Amazon Japan with my 'preferences'. Also deleted it. Need to focus... so I browsed Google Scholar for some papers I needed to read for another class. Oh, there seems to be an extensive review on the book that the researcher had done. Without paying much attention, I clicked on it. Voila. Amazon pops up. Hey, the feeds are so much interconnected so that one cannot completely shut just one particular thing off. My second lesson.
How about getting more radical? Something like... not turning on the Outlook Express for a day - no, for half a day for a starter. That should be manageable, since people usually sleep for some hours a day anyway. Okay, no email. Well, after some hours I received a call saying "I sent you an email, and wasn't sure if you'd received it." My third lesson: the information feed cannot be shut off by me alone. It is mutual in some sense.
All in all, information feeds are embedded into my daily lifestyle of receiving information in such a complex way so that it is virtually impossible to cut it off without changing my way of thinking and living itself. And I'm pretty sure that I won't be able to change that so easily either, without changing some significant portions of my social surroundings as well. c'est la vie.
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