Saturday, May 27, 2006

And here's the news, news, news...

I am so busy creating information to add to the information overload that I am out of touch. The rest of the torrent is backing up behind me as I churn out more words - a torrent in my own right.
And, day after day, I sit in a sea of other professionals who also are creating information flow. We have always been doing it, generations of us, producing newspapers and magazines and news services. We are the mainstream.
But now there are so many tributaries and creeks and drains feeding into the system - the mounting mass of alternative media, which is here, the Internet. The Blogsphere is just a segment.
As a long-term netizen, I have watched the growth and chosen carefully which of the feeds I will add to my information flow. It began with newslists and then to news subscriptions and the likes of Alternet and then news bulletins and newspaper headline teasers and journalist news tips, then Google selections and, well, the list becomes tedious. The point is that my emails both at work and home now are laden with the things I should read and I want to read, between the newspapers and before the books. I scan and speed read, delete with regret...dismissing whole sectors of the world and issues which require more attention than I have time to apply. For there is more to read...
Work now requires that at least three books a month are consumed for author interviews or review - and, of course, I am at the theatre several times a week and writing reviews late into the night. No wonder I never get around to blogging.
I admire the people who do - who have done their research, amassed their links and filtered their thoughts to provide regular lucid and well-informed blogs. I even admire the diary bloggers who find time to record the day's events.
I just wish I had time to read them all.
Which brings me full circle. I am so terribly behind.

Once there was a time when news moved slowly, when distances were great and people were not in touch with everything around the clock. Simpler times. We have a wonderful thing in the global village of instant personalised multimedia communications - but, oh, how it is turning me into a creature of fractured thoughts and eternal inadequacy.

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