Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2009 > August > 05 > Entry
Digital bankruptcy: sometimes it’s liberating
Last week, I wrote a short piece about the feelings of anxiety you get when your DVR starts to fail and you know you may lose all the recordings that have built up that haven’t yet been watched.
My fears were confirmed when the DirecTV technician came to my house on Saturday. He made some adjustments to the dish (which was seriously out of alignment), but concluded that it was the receiver in my living that was failing. Suddenly, all those episodes of “Nurse Jackie” and “Reno-911!” and others were about to walk out the door in a cardboard box, never to return.
I panicked, but only a little. It’s summer and most of the urgent TV watching (“Lost,” “24,” “Flight of the Conchords”) had been done back in May. Everything left was stuff I might get around to someday. Maybe. In a way, I was relieved that all those old “Saturday Night Live” episodes (which, truth be told, were pretty weak last season) would not be there to trudge through. Was I really going to watch 11 episodes of “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” a show I’ve gradually fallen out of love with?
Even though I didn’t declare DVR bankruptcy on purpose, it was still liberating to have all those shows off my list of things to do. As my wife succinctly put it when I told her that 8 episodes of “Desperate Housewives” she hadn’t watched were gone, “I don’t want TV watching to be homework.”
I’m starting to feel the same way about Google Reader. I follow dozens of Web sites using the RSS reader and at any one time, I usually have over 200 articles unread. If I go a day without checking it, it jumps to 500 or 600 items. On a bad week, it might creep up past 700. Skimming articles doesn’t take too long, but once my Wired and New York Times Technology feeds get past 50 unread items, is it unrealistic to assume I’ll go back and read everything someday?
I’ve been tempted to simply hit the “Mark All As Read” button and start fresh. If a story is more than a month old, how badly do I need to read it, anyway?
What stops me as that a log of blog entries were written by friends and are pieces I really do intend to go back and read, probably all at once, next time I have a free couple of hours.
But, yeah, Google Reader, like the DVR, begins to feel like work the longer stuff builds up. It can be overwhelming (and don’t even get me started on how hard it’s been to keep up with Twitter lately).
Are there technologies you struggle to catch up with? I’m pretty good about my e-mail these days, but Google Reader and my DVR are getting harder and harder to manage.
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By Addie
August 5, 2009 6:09 PM | Link to this
I had a much-needed and thorough Google Reader purge a while back. I went through and unsubscribed to feeds whose posts I knew I wouldn't really miss.
But that still leaves me with many, many feeds (about 100 Austin food blogs, then another 60 or so national food blogs, then friends' blogs and at the very bottom of the reader pole, other fun stuff on the Web I wish I had a monkey to read to give me a summary at the end of every day. But then I guess I'd have to learn monkey.:/)
Mark all as read isn't going to optional as more content is produced per blog or site per day. But another reality of online content these days is that it is being generated so quickly that after a few days or even a week, it loses most of its relevance.
It's a sad truth for those of us producing that content, but we have to learn to let go if we miss it when it's fresh out of the oven.
You wouldn't eat week-old biscuits, would you?