Information overload

I am writing for my blog, which is merely one of eleventy gajillion blogs in the universe and is probably part of the problem for which I'll provide a posting here.

There are blogs and news feeds that I keep regular track of, but to be honest, the information flow gets very overwhelming. I use Google Reader to keep track of the RSS feeds, but when you add news feeds into the mix, there are more than 20,000 items that flow to me within the span of a week.

Obviously, I cannot keep up. Critical to me are the news feeds for the AJC, Southern Voice, the New York Times and probably the Agence France-Press feeds, in addition to the PageOneQ news feed of gay news from all over the world. I consider all of my blog feeds important to me, though I just have to skim over some of the postings (snap judgments at Jezebel, while entertaining, are normally shuffled over very quickly) on certain ones. Google News is one feed that sometimes I just have to hit "mark all as read" without reading the stories; I had to completely cancel the Xinhua feed as the Chinese state news agency has TONS of stories coming out every day.

This brings me to a crumulent story on the NYT feed about news overload in the 21st century, and how that's affecting people's psyches. Following the presidential campaign (and the polls therein) at every minute of the day can cause you to be wildly bipolar about your candidate (the worst among fellow Barack Obama supporters was when John McCain got his Sarah Palin and post-convention bounce, before the economy went into the toilet and into the bowels of the global rhetorical sewer) and his chances; following the economic crapalulafest can make you extremely paranoid about your money and leads to tendencies where you want to withdraw all of your money from Wachovia, even though it's FDIC insured.

As much as I say that I don't want to check my reader and my e-mail at every moment of the day, it's hard not to. It's very addictive, and I don't know how to break the habit other than disconnecting the ethernet connection on the work computer (and the home computer on the weekends), even though I still need the Internet for work-related reasons. When my ISP was down a few weeks ago, I really felt cut off from the world (which was exacerbated by the fuel crunch we had here -- a fuel crunch which is now gone, and indeed, prices are going waaaaay down).

It's great to find out what's going on in the world, though; and this blog is also a form of therapy and expression for me. It's a tough balance for which I have no immediate solution.