Is Del.icio.us making us stupid?
by asi
To paraphrase the title of the much discussed article from Nicolas Carr, I wanted to share an unstructured thought with you regarding feeds, bookmarking, skimming and the lost of depth or, put differently, the hidden problem within tools that suppose to help us with the information overload.
I might be extrapolating from my own ADD experience but recently I’ve got this strong feeling that:
1. RSS tools that made it so easy to become feed-junkies and created the scanning, skimming and hopping patterns of our web-reading, complemented with
2. Social bookmarking tools like de.licio.us that might actually give us the illusion that ‘you know what you saved’ or that if you park a half-read article you will come back to it later when you have the time or when you ‘really’ need it.
These two elements put together have created a culture of excessive, yet shallow reading and the lost of depth. Like kids in candy shop we try to taste/ grab as much as possible but mostly ending up unsatisfied or even with a stomach pain…
Case in point. I just had half an hour downtime between meetings which I wanted to spend on reading some blogstuff with my google reader. I’m subscribed to only 110 feeds but on a busy week like this one, over 700 posts already waiting for my time and attention (that in itself puts you under pressure that you’re not keeping up). So I started reading/skimming through and over 20min I quickly skimmed though roughly 35 posts and bookmarked about 7 which I’ve found interesting, meaningful and relevant.
But if I’m honest with myself, my de.licio.us is just a massive bin for half-read information that I’ll never actually read or get back to because I’m too busy skimming through and saving other stuff… Surely when I’m working on something specific I always go back to my delicious library but I guess that I’m re-reading no more than 3% of the articles I saved.
The point I’m trying to make is that the abundance of content, our crave not to miss a thing and the ease of parking information, all combined, give us the illusion of knowledge, almost as if these tools are an extension of our brains – like an external hard drive which we can always get plugged to whenever we need, so why read deeper? Why do I need to immerse myself in a lengthy article when I can just skimmed through it and move on to the next? Why get caught up in the narrative or the turns of an argument in this blogpost when I can bookmark it and look for something else to read?
Now don’t get me wrong – the merits of social bookmarking are far greater than the problem it creates but I sometimes do feel that the ease of saving and the pressure of infoload make us cut some corners.
I cant tell you how much I’ve both enjoyed and learned from following a few special peoples bookmarks. But maybe thats just me Asi.
Definitely interesting things to look at. And in addition, sometimes I’ve tried looking for half read articles I saved and had a hard time remembering what they were actually tagged under. And sometimes to realise, I never saved it in the first place. On the other hand, searching through Delicious tags when doing research can be brilliant and I often came across sites, posts, or else that i hadn’t found anywhere else.
I’m with Charles on this one. Delicious is definitely making one’s feed followers more intelligent. I always find Charles’ delicious feeds a treasure trove of everything essential to read.
According to me, the problem is that our tools are evolving faster than it takes for our social intelligence to figure how to use them/get on top of them.
There’s also a conundrum here. I too find it difficult to keep up with my delicious saves – but I’m always more than willing to look up and read what someone else has saved.
I use delicious a lot – watching other people’s feeds, adding my entries into my own blog’s subscription for quick half-posts and for teaching and/or presentations. I like being able to have my bookmarks on the web instead of on one machine too.
Intelligence and research has always been about knowing where to look something up more than remembering it.
There’s a section of Plato’s Phaedrus (370 BC) where Socrates says the same thing about the new information technology of the time: writing. See the couple quotes on this blog. And…it looks like Carr’s article references Phaedrus too.
I have a personal rule that I don’t bookmark something publicly until I’ve read it and absorbed it to my satisfaction. I can look at my bookmarks and say that each of them represents something in my head. I also have a never-ending list of to-read-and-absorb bookmarks stored privately, and of course it’s a challenge to go back and read them. But it’s fairly common for me to be working on something a few months down the line and say “Oh man, I wish I’d saved [x] – it’s relevant now and I’d like to read it” and I can find it by digging through those private bookmarks.
My delicious rule is to read the article in full including the comments, tag it, see who else has tagged it, add additional tags that other people have used if they provide important context — then forget all about it in the hopes that if I’ve learned something through this process, it has stuck.