Feed Me

Once again sounding a recurrent theme, RSS feeds add to the cacophony of unlimited, instantly available information, albeit you select the feed you want to receive. This allows you to mainline your most necessary info directly to your "aggregator", a term particularly apt as aggregate is also the term for the coarse material- crushed stone, slag, gravel- added to cement or asphalt to cheaply extend the amount of concrete, another words filler.

Obviously their are many instances where this sort of service could/would be extremely helpful for many persons, but clearly many more people are feeding off of People, Us or OK magazines' RSS s than the NYT or WSJ.

The idea is that this gives you control over the info that comes your way is true but that just adds another stream to the river of info that overflows our banks everyday. A newstory Friday on NPR reported that according to the the Council for Research Excellence, an industry group funded by the Nielsen Company, "Most people average more than eight hours a day facing a screen of some sort — whether it be a television, computer, mobile phone or even GPS."
Hell, I can't even get gas anymore without having a television, with an inaccessible voloume control, talking to me- Gas Station TV it's called. (And just as an aside: The researchers were surprised to learn that younger baby boomers, aged 45 to 54, averaged roughly an hour more screen time than any other age group, including teenagers.)

In Future Shock, Alvin Toffler posited that change tended to disorient people and drive them to certain predictable behaviors, and that the rate of change had been and would continue to accelerate all the time. I think he is right and now the internet, and even GSTV, have only made things worse by increasing people's awareness of the rate of change because of the ubiquity of news or information about those changes.

I learned the the libray would not be closing this Friday afterall- which was useful but disappointing, because i subscribed to the director's and staff's blogs through our staff page.
This would be the link: http://staff/rss/director.aspx