“Information overload”

Leading on from an earlier blog post, Joy Of Tech read my mind and provided this comic.

If only my internets had an off button… wait, what? It does?!

Content Overload

I’ve been finding recently that I’m often stuck when deciding what to do in a bit of free time.  Not because there’s nothing to do, but that there’s too much to do. I’m talking about media: television, film, newspapers, music, blogs, podcasts, video games… you get the idea.  What I don’t understand is how any individual with a reasonable interest in anything can be expected to consume at least a reasonable portion of the media that a)  is intended for the consumer, or b)  the consumer would like to.. consume.

The problem I see is that audiences aren’t necessarily limited by consumer interest or the product’s reach anymore, but limited by the individual’s capacity for media intake. This is even more important with the dawn of “new media”, and particularly Internet content, where a practically unlimited amount of content is available to the consumer at any one point.

In my experience this means that my RSS reader is constantly overflowing – whilst simultaneously, I want to play an Xbox game, watch a DVD or TV programme, catch up with the last few weeks of the Totally Rad Show, or listen to music. And with all this media surrounding me, I just cannot do all of it.

Currently, the average game takes me a few months to complete – even one Sam & Max episode took me about two weeks. I have at least a couple of thousand unread RSS news items at any given time, and a queue of DVDs i’ve bought and films I’ve acquired but yet to watch. There have been several movies this year already that I haven’t had the time to go and see before they vanished from the cinema (and that’s a different rant entirely), as well as a few TV episodes that I missed.

And I’ve barely scratched the surface – if I wanted, I could find a lot more content that I would like to consume, but simply haven’t the time to. And I haven’t even included other activities such as social networking, forums / comments, and of course, y’know, going to work and having a life.

Strangely, there are many people who seem to be able to watch every movie they desire, get through any game in a snap, keep up to speed with the news, and have a trillion tracks played on Last.FM. But there’s no way on god’s earth that all of these can be the same person. I have an inkling that a lot of people find one type of media and stick to it.

Maybe I’m just being too broad when wanting to take on everything I can. But I’m sure this must be a real problem, and I doubt they’ll ever be a solution. As time goes on, there’ll just be more media available and being crammed down our collective throats – willingly or not.