So, the strangest thing happened this morning, and it has caused me to reflect a little earlier than I’m prone to do in the course of a day. After careful consideration, I decided it would make a fine topic to christen the blog…
Now, those that know me can confirm that I am quite vocal about my love and adulation of Google Reader. I’ll admit it. Everyone at Stubble is pretty hooked. It has easily become a morning tradition that regularly consumes no less than an hour, as I keep pace with news feeds on a wide swath of topics, from an even wider range of sources. It’s been said that, if you want to know what’s really going on in the world, watch every American news channel, combine the intersecting parts, and you’ll likely arrive at a de-sensationalized, unbiased report. If it’s true, the internet’s worse. And thanks to my content aggregator of choice, tailored specifically to my interests, I’ve recently learned that Bill Clinton is a diplomatic superstar (BBC), iPods spontaneously combust (Engadget + 13 others), Apple is hammering out a licensing deal in China for the iPhone (TUAW), TechCrunch is TMZ for geeks (_self), and a handful of crazy Photoshop and CSS tricks that I will likely never use (CSSTricks & PSD.tuts: I mean, who really needs to make a guy look like an abstract werewolf anyways).
There are a good number more of other feeds I follow, but that’s the beauty of Google Reader. It serves to easily and extensibly distill an enormous amount of content to a much more digestible stream of relevant material (except for the BBC – zomg). The internet is an insurmountable wealth of information. You could never (and boy, do I mean never) be able to view it all, nor would you want to. And as a content consumer, we yearn to be fed. Whereas we formerly needed to forage for information, we can satiate our appetites with this massive, adjustable pipeline to our dinner plates, to continue the metaphor, leading to two interesting phenomena. First, sharing items with like-minded individuals casts a rather impressive net on the events of a day. Having and contributing quality “shares” makes it extremely difficult to miss information, which is pretty important to me and this company’s direction as a start-up. This is particularly magnified when friends and coworkers are equally addicted to consuming information, with less time spent catching everyone up to speed and more time discussing the actual content. Also, and arguably more intriguing, is the effect it has on the desire for knowledge. I was purposefully inaccurate previously when I mentioned that Google Reader satiates one’s appetite for information. It does, but only to a point. After a while, though, your appetite grows. Google Reader makes you hungrier.
And this was my observation this morning. In a discrete event, I witnessed my appetite expand (imagine the scene in “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” when his heart breaks the X-ray frame – yeah, just like that). After exhausting all of new items, Google Reader was done with me. But I wasn’t done with it. There was an instant, inescapable need to know more. The quality and merit of this information can be scrutinized, of course, but that isn’t the point. Google Reader makes knowledge acquisition addictive. Blogs and commentary are only worth so much, and when you get tired of keeping tabs on the Apple/Google debacle like some crazy pop-star, you’ll turn your focus elsewhere and actually learn something.
Or, you know, go back to work.