3by9

Stop Following Everybody, Stop Information Diarrhea, Start Being Interesting, Start Thinking For Yourself

This post is dedicated to people who feel that in order to be the most informed they can be, they need to hear all information from all parties at all times of the day across all mediums. It’s a fallacy. It makes you unproductive. It dilutes your opinions. Stop doing it. And stop perpetuating it.

FriendFeed and Socialthing are services that let you facilitate information overload and you should stay away from them. Yes, many people I know use these services, and I’m saying they’re bad for your mental health. The reason they are bad is because they trick you into thinking that each item you read is useful and important to understanding what your “friend” is currently thinking & doing when you don’t need to know everything that your “friend” is currently thinking & doing. Granted, posting your inner thought process as a human being into Twitter is the culprit for this type of informational diarrhea, so tell your friends (and yourself) to stop doing that as well. I don’t care what you’re thinking about at the moment, what you’re contemplating, when you’re done contemplating, what you’ve decided to do, any of that. None of that is interesting and the publication of such information furthers the trends of Twitter streams being uninteresting and annoying.

People that write blog entries — when they have nothing interesting to say — just so that they can say they blogged today are the same types of people who post random thoughts to Twitter just because they know those thoughts will get blasted out to all their followers. This is a horrible practice and it needs to stop. Push your ego and vanity aside and only publish things that are interesting. Remember that with the advent of FriendFeed and Socialthing, your posts are replicated to the screens of many others, so make sure your words matter.

Matt Linderman points out the words of Ricardo Semler on minimizing your information intake:

“I estimate that the ratio of useless to relevant reading material is about 20 to 1. With that in mind, my advice is to reduce the literary inflow to a maximum of two newspapers a day, two weekly magazines, and two publications in a specialized field. Start being proud of not being aware of everything. The reward will be an opportunity to THINK.”

Seeing words past by your head from 16,000 people you follow does not make you a more competent and thoughtful being. It makes your opinions blend into everyone else’s until you have no more real opinions, you just have 16,000 things you read and you picked one to agree with. Once this happens, posting original thought to your blog is nearly impossible and you resort to the easy way out of analyzing someone else’s viewpoint because it’s easier than writing your own good article. It’s almost unbelievable to me how little original thought is now posted to blogs (if you want good original thought, head to Tyme Said and Expert Idiot) because posting a well-written and original article to a blog now is almost as foreign as RSS feeds were a few years ago.

Dealing With Information

I am subscribed to 38 feeds in Bloglines, and 8 of those are feeds from 9rules or Chawlk. I follow 65 people on Twitter but 1) I don’t have Twitter updates sent to my phone, and 2) I only visit or post to Twitter once every couple days, so there’s little overload there. I don’t use Socialthing or FriendFeed or any other similar service. I do read a lot of websites, but the act of reading them is deliberate and I actually visit the site instead of plugging it into Bloglines and seeing the titles scroll by in the mash of all other titles. When I decide to read a blog entry that I find via my Bloglines subscriptions, I click over and read it on the site.

Everything I choose to absorb into my brain is deliberate. Every topic I read about I do so because I’m honestly interested in it, not because 16,000 of my “friends” posted about it and it entered my subconscious due to visual repetition. I’m careful about what I consider to be a good source of information, and don’t succumb to the informational spew that some crave.

In short, I pay attention to things that matter to me, and don’t pay attention to things that don’t. I only write about things I care about, and don’t write about things that I don’t. If you apply these principals to the information you output and the information you input, then you’re on your way to having a perspective that’s untarnished by the informational diarrhea outputted by the masses.