Clutter or News Source

For the first three months of living in my studio, I did not have a television. I rarely watched the news, and I had an RSS feeds for specific companies and mail subscription notifications of top headlines from Crain's and San Antonio Business Journal. I was still missing something though.

Fast forward to present day, I have a television I still rarely use, but I have optimized my social media profiles to feed me information I want to read. Any person who is linked to me on Facebook can attest to my daily posts. In fact, I think they detest my posts. I use several different avenues to get my information and I tend to use Facebook as another means of blogging.

I like reading articles on Mashable for some headlines but I still want to get more news faster. I tend to read Hacker News quite a bit too, but refreshing seems to be tedious. I also subscribe to several news sources on Twitter. In an hour my tweeter page tells me I have 73 new tweets. Each twitter subscription I have attends to a different aspect of what interests me. I have subscriptions to Crain's and Mashable (can't go wrong with those), but I have increased my subscriptions to include several others based on technology or business related sources.

This is where clutter comes in. With all these venues to get news, I get tons of tweets and retweets, or posts giving me the same information. With television, if I watch a channel and the headlines cycle back, I switch to a different station. Maybe, I watch CSPAN, or more likely, I watch Sponge Bob. The growing amount of news comes together into a big mass of regurgitated and rehashed information on the web.

Yesterday, I read three articles on how Steve Jobs blasted Adobe on their software. I read a bunch more headlines that would tell me the same thing, so I decided to skip those readings. Of the three I read, one broke down Jobs' Jobsism into words I could understand (it was very funny and patronizing at the same time). Another author took the information and spun it as a piece on anti-Steve Jobs. Mostly, I felt like the author wanted to reprimand Steve Jobs on his poor method of executing his opinion. The last was a video article with the CEO of Adobe expressing his view point on the matter.

Honestly, those three were almost withing seconds of each other. I like the ability to get the news fast, but I want to be able to spread the amount of news topics. With this technology, I do not have the ability to switch channels. Also, if the topic repeats, I cannot zip or zap my way through boredom. The only thing I can do is to unsubscribe to the plethora of news outlets and be left with my television set watching news.