Internet Addiction

Just as Louis XIV once said “L’état, c’est moi,” I’ll now say “The Internet is Google Reader.” It’s genuinely strange to me to hear, for example on Radioti, questions about whether people use RSS. I, for one, have long since read nothing but RSS — if I come across an interesting site, I add it to Google Reader and follow it from there.

And so now I have 139 subscriptions covering all sorts of topics — fun stuff, IT, politics, blogs, more IT, and more fun stuff. 3,500 posts over 30 days. I can’t imagine a more optimal way to organize regular access to information. On top of that, RSS makes it possible to miss nothing that’s been published in a feed.

However, reading posts takes a lot of time — sometimes it’s interesting to follow a link, and often — as on LOR or “Dorozhniy Kontrol” — to also read the comments. So I decided to try going a week without Reader. Today I’ll mark all posts as read, and in 7 days I’ll come back and see what I missed. Because in the end, an enormous amount of time goes into consuming information — leaving none left for producing it.