We start freaking out.

This post is a detailed overview of how I personally manage media content in my life. (I won’t include how I manage other types of information like financial and contact information — that’s a whole other story.) I should emphasize that there is no single media management system that will work for everyone. Everyone has different types and amounts of information to process. Because of my job and my own interests I probably consume much more media than others, and so have developed a fairly intricate system that, though extremely automated, still requires more daily attention than most are probably willing to invest.

Finding and Consuming Media

There are three main factors that influenced how I designed this system:

1. Media types — above all else, I categorize media by whether it is text, audio, or video. Each has its own advantage. I love text because it is searchable and easy to copy and paste. Audio is fantastic because it is the only media type that allows me to multitask. I listen to podcasts and audiobooks as I bicycle to the office, work out in the gym, clean my apartment and wait in Mexico City’s round-the-clock traffic. Video, on the other hand, demands your full attention which is probably why it can make such a big impact on our lives. I tend to only consume video at night, either on my television or my iPad.
2. Device types — another strong consideration is that I consume media every day on four different devices. I want access to all my media from all four devices: 1) my iPhone where I listen to podcasts and frequently discover new media via Twitter, Google Reader, and email; 2) my iPad where I read books, feature-length articles, academic papers, and watch 10 – 15 minute videos from TED, PopTech, YouTube, and Vimeo; 3) my laptop computer which serves as the home base for all my media and documents; and 4) my television which is hooked up to a Mac Mini media server — this is where I watch most movies and documentaries, and occasionally where I listen to podcasts as I clean my apartment.
3. Info-snacking versus deep reading — after a while I came to realize that I consume media in two different ways: 1) info-snacking in which I scan a vast amount of content to get an overview of a particular topic or to get a feel for the day’s news; and 2) deep reading which usually takes place on my couch with a cup of tea or on a park bench in Parque México. Many observers like Nicholas Carr point out that we are increasingly spending more time info-snacking at the expense of the time we spend reading deeply and reflecting. While I think that Carr tends to exaggerate the inability of my generation to read deeply (just look at Goodreads), I do think it’s important to set aside a certain amount of time each day to commit to a single piece of media for at least 45 minutes to an hour.

Good Morning: Toast, Coffee, Info-snacking

Before I even get out of bed I reach for my iPad and start up my NPR app. As I listen to the five-minute morning news roundup, I look through all of the latest NPR stories and make a personalized 30-minute playlist of the four – six stories that interest me the most. I listen to this playlist as I shower and make breakfast. With my toast and coffee in hand I walk the ten feet to my home office (now green at the request of Tricia).

Every morning I spend about an hour to 90 minutes scanning various sources of media to get a general feel for the day’s news. During this time I never read anything longer than three paragraphs. First I read through my email and click on all the links to articles that people have recommended to me. If these articles are less than three paragraphs then I read them right away. If they are longer, and I determine that they are worth my time, then I save them to Instapaper to read later on my iPad or iPhone.

After email I look through my three Twitter accounts (@oso, @civicinfolatam, @infocivi) to see what articles my contacts have been recommending. Very few of the Twitter users I follow write about what they ate for lunch; rather the service is much more like a list of cleverly worded headlines written by individuals I trust. Each of those headlines then links to the main article. I probably read about 3% of the articles that my Twitter contacts link to. Still, I find it valuable to know what they find valuable on a daily basis. Of those articles I do read, if they are less than three paragraphs then I will read them right away; if they are longer then I save them to Instapaper to read later in the day. I use Nambu to read through my Twitter accounts on my laptop, the official Twitter app for my iPhone, and Twitterific for my iPad.

Next I read through the feeds in my RSS reader. I use Google Reader to store all of the most recent articles from the 307 feeds I am subscribed to. While all of the information is stored in Google Reader, I use NetNewsWire for my laptop, iPhone, and iPad so that I can continue to read the articles even when I’m not connected to the internet (which is often when I am traveling). Every morning there are an average of 600 – 800 new pieces of content waiting for me. As you can imagine I skim quickly through all of the headlines, but only read a small minority of the articles and blog posts. From a total of 800 new articles every day in my RSS reader I probably read around 15 short articles (less than three paragraphs) and two long articles on average.

In addition to long articles and blog posts that I save to Instapaper, I also often come across PDF reports and short video clips that I want to watch later. PDF reports I save to my Dropbox folder, which I can access automatically via my iPhone, iPad, and both of my computers. While the Dropbox applications allow you to read PDFs directly inside the apps, I prefer using GoodReader which has more functionality and connects automatically to your Dropbox and Google Docs accounts (in addition to other services). If I discover a 5 – 10 minute YouTube clip that I want to watch later, I drag the link to Evom which automatically downloads and adds the video to iTunes, which then syncs to both my iPhone and iPad.

The podcasts I listen to on a regular basis.

Lastly I open up iTunes where I am subscribed to around 25 different audio and video podcasts. Currently iTunes tell me that I have 75 episodes waiting for my attention, and that it will take me 1.4 days to listen to everything. I try to download podcasts selectively so that I realistically can listen to everything I download, but often I am only able to catch up when I take a long flight or road trip.

Deep Reading

Instapaper allows me to read long articles on any device with an interface that doesn’t tire my eyes. It removes all advertisements and unnecessary text from the articles.

After my morning routine of info-snacking I usually have around two to three hours of media content to consume throughout the rest of the day. I tend to do this in hour-long blocks. I listen to around 90 minutes of podcasts and audio books during my afternoon run and my time in the gym. I read for about 60 minutes on a bench in the park. Then I’ll read for another thirty minutes when I’m at home on my couch and before I go to bed. Often times I watch a documentary movie while I eat dinner.

I read e-books on my iPad, and occasionally on my iPhone. I use both the Kindle and iBook apps to read various books (though I prefer iBooks). Both applications synchronize what page I am on and my bookmarks so that if I finish off at page 113 on my iPad it will automatically start me at 113 on my iPhone as well.

Admittedly, I tend to info snack a couple more times throughout the day, though I am trying to spend more time reading deeply and less time info-snacking. I use Twitter, FlipBoard, NetNewsWire, and Google FastFlip to info-snack throughout the day, mostly from my iPhone and iPad.

Flipboard for the iPad feels just like a traditional magazine, but it’s content comes from recommended links by my Facebook and Twitter contacts. I can send longer articles to Instapaper directly from within the app.

Processing and Sharing Media

Everything so far relates to how I organize and consume media. But there is a more important guiding question: Why the hell am I reading/watching/listening to this? In part it is to become a better person: more informed, worldly, empathetic. But I am also aware of my place in the information ecology, and my role in spreading information across different communities. With each piece of content I consume, there are nine possible outputs:

• Do nothing – either delete the content (if I never ever will use it again) or store it in my media archive so that I can search for it in the future. This is what I do with 75% of content I consume. I use a program called Together to manage an archive of content I’ve read. Instapaper also keeps an archive (though there are no promises that it will be permanent.)
• Share via email – if the content is directly relevant to a particular person or small group of people then I will send an email with the link and the relevant excerpt(s).
• Share via twitter – I manage three different Twitter accounts – one personal and two for work. Twitter is a great social way to share information related to recent news, but it is especially bad at building an archive of well-organized bookmarks.
• Share via Delicious – when I need to organize bookmarks by category so that I can find them later on I use Delicious. I have both a personal and a work account, and they help me build bibliographies for future blog posts and essays. I use Pukka to easily post to both accounts without having to log in and log out. Pukka is also great for quickly searching past bookmarks.
• Share via Facebook – Sometimes I find information that strikes me as oddly intriguing, such as how porcupines have sex. This, in my opinion, is requisite reading for anyone I consider a friend. Many applications now have a “share via facebook” option. In my browser I use the Facebook bookmarklet.
• Share via Tumblr – though I haven’t been using Tumblr lately, an essay by Steven Berlin Johnson about the 18th century practice of keeping a commonplace book convinced me to start collecting scraps of content that influence the evolution of my thinking.
• Share via Goodreads – if it is a book. I usually also leave a small review with my thoughts and reflections.
• Create an outline – often times I choose to read/listen/watch particular types of content because I’m working on a blog post or research paper. I use MarsEdit and OmniOutliner to take notes on my laptop and Simplenote to take notes on my iPhone and iPad.
• Translate an article – I often feel that the most valuable output is when I decide to translate an article from Spanish to English or English to Spanish. I do this with the help of Google Translator Toolkit, which remembers how I personally like to translate key, common phrases.

That may seem like a ridiculous number of outputs and a lot of work, but it literally takes me about 10 seconds to share information via email/Twitter/Delicious/Facebook/Tumblr, and I hardly ever spend more than an hour a day writing blog posts.

Stepping Away From it All

At this point you probably thing that I do nothing more with my life than submerge myself with media. While it’s true that I probably spend more time consuming media than most, I never spend anytime watching advertisements and I don’t play video games. Still, I’m increasingly aware of the need to step away from media completely. @shirafu recently pointed me to the NY Times article “Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime,” which really struck a chord with me. If we don’t step away from media we fail to engage with it meaningfully. At least once a day I try to spend time simply staring at the ceiling and/or going for a walk around my neighborhood. I am trying to spend more weekends out in the mountains away from connectivity. Cooking dinner has also been a recent source of calm for me.

Some Content Gems

Here is a list of some of my favorite sources of content (not all are legal):

• NetFlix – movies, television series, and documentaries.
• Avaxhome – ebooks, audiobooks, videos
• AAARG.org – academic papers
• iTunes U – university lectures
• MVGroup – documentary movies
• BBC Worldservice Documentaries – consistently interesting audio documentaries. I listen to almost all of them.

Bonus

I rarely watch television, but when I do, this is how. (Again, I never watch advertisements.)

Colophon

In traditional print publishing a colophon is a brief description of the printing and publication of the book. Early bloggers like John Gruber re-appropriated the term to describe a list of tools used to produce digital media. Below is a list of all the applications and services I have mentioned above.

Please feel free to leave a comment below to explain how you manage the river of media.

My hope is that one day our children will look back at photos like this one and make fun of us in the same way that we look back at photos of our parents from the 60′s and 70′s and shake our heads in sympathy and shame.

Once we all reach that caloric daily limit then the food industry can only grow at 1% (the average growth rate of the earth’s population). There is, after all, only so much food you can stuff down one person. The food industry got around this limitation by developing “foods” without any calories or fat – things like Coke Zero and potato chips made with Olean, which famously – so I’ve been told – causes anal leakage:

[Hence the need for anal bleaching.]

Information is also an inelastic good. There is a limit to how much information the human brain can consume in a single day. Once we reach that limit we develop information obesity – or, information overload as it’s normally called – which leads to stress, guilt, and feelings of meaninglessness. We may ask ourselves what is the point of drinking a diet soda that our bodies do not need. And we might also ask ourselves, what is the use of consuming information at all, and how do we know if we need it or not?

Information has always been a commodity. The greater the demand for information, and the more scarce that information is, the greater its value. The business model behind selling information has always been to function as a gatekeeper between the information and the access to that information. In relation to one another, information was scarce and demand was high.

That is, until all of the world’s information was made available in aggregate. Added to the “old media” are billions of contributions of information from sources that were previously excluded by the gatekeepers. Demand for information has stayed the same (after all, there is only so much the human brain can process per day) but the supply of information expands exponentially. (Kevin Kelly calls this phenomenon “the expansion of ignorance“.)

As information expands exponentially, the value of each individual piece of information declines exponentially. With the abundance of information comes the scarcity of attention. Value now lies not in information, but in its relevance: filtering, sorting, contextualizing that which “speaks to us”. Value is not in data but in eloquence.

There is, however, still one more gate between information and access to that information: language. If I were monolingual then I would only have access to a percentage of the world’s information available online. Let’s say, for example, that I wanted more information about Dao Lang, a Chinese pop star and the number one search term in China for 2005. Information about the singer in English is scant, but surely there are thousands of articles available in Chinese. If only I could request – and probably pay – someone to translate one of those articles into English.

Conceptualizing a system to allow readers to request translations of content that interest them and to facilitate the process of that translation is the new job description for Marc Herman who is leading Global Voices’ translation exchange.

I am skeptical of the project, but it’s the type of skepticism that I hope is proven wrong. The most obvious question is, how do I know that I want to read something if I don’t know what it says? And, more importantly, why would I invest time and money requesting more information with less context when my hard drive is already brimming over with unread articles, unwatched movies, and un-listened-to podcasts?

To make such an investment I would need a pretty strong connection to Dao Lang, the Chinese pop singer. And if such a strong connection existed, wouldn’t that inspire me to learn Chinese, or to meet fellow Dao Lang fans who could provide me with the context I’m looking for?

We consume information as much for our social needs as our need to be informed. In fact, I’m not sure you can even distinguish the two. We don’t really care about Mark Sanford and his affair, but we read about it because the collective awareness about the case allows us to participate in conversations about the values and issues that underlie it. When I was in Argentina 80% of the news I read was about Argentina and the region because it allowed me to engage in conversations with those around me. Now that I’m in The Hague I’m following related news. Our social interactions define the information we consume much more than the other way around.

Social translation is here to stay, but the key is that it is social. Lena translated my post about Cochabamba as a gesture of friendship. Once money is inserted into the equation it becomes something else.

A lot of communities and tools have sprung up in recent years trying to make the translation market more efficient by cutting out wasteful middleman agencies like Lionbridge. Among others are Social Translator, dotSUB, Worldwide Lexicon, and iCanLocalize. Some companies like Facebook and LinkedIn have flirted with crowdsourcing the localization of their websites, but the lesson tends to be that volunteer translators don’t feel very social toward for-profit companies. There will always be a demand for translated information, but those translations will still have to compete in a world of over-abundant information and starved attention.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the supply and demand of information these days. A couple months ago I walked into El Ateneo, one of the world’s largest bookstores, to meet up with my buddy Scott. As I looked around at the mountains upon mountains of hardcovers, paperbacks, magazines, and newspapers I was hit by a kind of intellectual vertigo. On the one hand, here is humanity’s greatest accomplishment: culture, the ability to transmit knowledge, stories, and values from one generation to the next to eternity. On the other hand, with sadness and frustration I realized that in my life I would only come into contact with a small percentage of that culture. And that with each new year – and the exponential expansion of information – I would come into contact with a smaller and smaller percentage. The expansion of ignorance is inevitable.

No one seems to care.

And all of a sudden I’m OK with that. We are 6.5 billion people on this planet. We can’t pretend to care about everyone. And if we do, well, then it’s just that, pretending.

Global Voices’ mission was, and I suppose still is, to shine light on those voices traditionally ignored by the mainstream media. Now there is a new force at work to make all voices ignored – the fact that there are just too many of them. We are drowning in noise. And we are adding water to the flooding river.

Last year … hell, maybe it was more than a year ago … I had lunch with Boris in San Francisco. He was the first person to tell me that he had stopped using his RSS reader. There was no way to keep up, he said, and besides, it all stopped seeming important. Now people left and right tell me they’ve given up on their RSS readers. Instead they just click a link or even enter in a website URL whenever it might occur to them. Josh is looking for an RSS replacement. (He’ll also soon be responsible for adding more water to the flood.) Beth Kanter also complains that she isn’t able to keep up with her RSS feeds anymore. But she’s written so many posts just in the past day alone that I’m not able to find the one about information overload.

Are we talking too much? Is the fact that so many people are talking about so many people talking too much the ultimate irony?

There is a long thread on Edge.org which was inspired by by Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic Monthly article “Is Google Making us Stupid?” Carr’s argument is that the stream-like flow of information on the internet is making it difficult for many of us to read anything longer than three paragraphs. Because Carr’s argument was longer than three paragraphs, I didn’t read it.

Until last night, finally.

All of my fellow nine white American males participating in the discussion made excellent points about the significance of today’s (over)abundance of information. But the bit that really hit home for me comes from W. Daniel Hillis:

We evolved in a world where our survival depended on an intimate knowledge of our surroundings. This is still true, but our surroundings have grown. We are now trying to comprehend the global village with minds that were designed to handle a patch of savanna and a close circle of friends. Our problem is not so much that we are stupider, but rather that the world is demanding that we become smarter. Forced to be broad, we sacrifice depth. We skim, we summarize, we skip the fine print and, all too often, we miss the fine point. We know we are drowning, but we do what we can to stay afloat …

It is not just that the world has gotten more complicated (it has), but rather that more of the world has become relevant. Not only is world more connected (or, as Thomas Friedman would, say, flatter), but it is also bigger. There are more people, and more of them than ever have the resources to do something that matters to us …

We need to know more because we are expected to make more decisions. I can choose my own religion, my own communications carrier, and my own health care provider. As a resident of California, I vote my opinion on the generation of power, the definition of marriage and the treatment of farm animals. In the olden days, these kinds of things were decided by the King …

I also need to know more just to have friends. I manage to get by without knowing exactly why Paris Hilton is famous, but I cannot fully participate in society without knowing that she is well known. Of course, my own social clan has its own Charlie Rose version of celebrities, complete with must-read books, must-understand ideas, and must-see films. I am expected to have an opinion about the latest piece in The Atlantic or the New Yorker. Actually, I need to learn more just to understand the cartoons.

I rearranged and extracted from Hillis’ argument. But the essential significance, at least for me, remains the same: Just because we can befriend anyone anywhere in the world, and just because we can learn about where they come from, does that mean that we should?

How do we decide who we care about? How do we decide what to read about? What is it that makes our brain remember and value certain conversations but not others?

A couple weeks ago I was sitting at a dinner table with people from various parts of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. There were about 12 of us in total and we were doing what strangers do when they eat together for the first time: making small talk. As the conversation went around the table I asked my new acquaintances about the latest news items I had read about their countries. It didn’t matter if they were from Vietnam, Ukraine, Korea, or Angola – thanks to Global Voices I knew the latest events, scandals, and debates in all of their countries. Eventually someone asked how it was that I seemed to know everything about everywhere in the world. It was, of course, my opportunity to suggest that they too read Global Voices.

But now that I think about it, besides impressing international groups at dinner tables, why is it that I keep reading about Vietnam?

I have all 2.2 gigabytes of Wikipedia on my iPhone. That’s right, I downloaded Wikipedia and put it on my iPhone to read offline. (It has been helpful to, for example, settle arguments about which was Weezer’s first album.)

I could buy a solar iPhone charger, hide out in the Himalaya, read all of Wikipedia, and return to civilization three years later. What would I gain? How much would I remember? What would my brain do with its new 2.2 gigabytes of worldly information?

I’m not the first person to ponder that question. A few years ago I read a book by some witty journalist who read all of the Britannica encyclopedia from A to Z. I think it took him a year. The resulting book was a collection of strange facts and stories contained within Britannica as well as funny stories about how reading the entire encyclopedia affected his social life.

But that’s about all I remember. (I also recall that there was a chapter in which the author takes a speedreading class and comes to the conclusion that it harms his reading comprehension.) In fact, that is why I am determined to write reviews of every book I read on GoodReads – I’m afraid it’s the only way I’ll remember what the hell it is I have read.

So will I keep up with Rising Voices? Keep adding more water to the torrent?

Yes. Because even though we all complain about information overload, it’s not as if we’ve stopped reading and consuming media. Part of it is a technology problem: we haven’t yet discovered how to discover what it is we want to discover. Or, to put it another way, even though I have all 2.2 gigabytes of Wikipedia on my iPhone, I rarely know what to start reading about.

Even though you might not care what some young girl in Dhaka has to say today, maybe someday you will. Or, if not you, maybe someone else will.

This feeling of drowning in information goes away once we realize that it’s OK to just stand back and watch the river go by. That it’s OK to focus on just a drop here, and drop there.

I’ll also keep with Rising Voices and keep writing about it because, as Leonard writes, “it feels good.”

PS: I too have been cutting back on my RSS reading lately. But every day I have been reading one post from the archives of Zen Habits. It’s become a sort of bible, something to go back to, for the era of abundance. Here is a good place to start.