Fellow blogger, and current roommate of mine, Hazen wrote an article today about being what he calls “Caught in the delta”. If I am understanding the nature of the article, he doesn’t mean we’re like Survivor stuck on a little piece of land at the end of a river, rather how we as human beings in the 21st century are caught in a never-ending loop of change, which is fueled by the never-ending supply of information. Stuck constantly adapting ourselves to the latest updates in news, we are making substantial changes to the way we live and survive on a nearly daily basis, and there’s no sign of it letting up any time soon.

Being a product of the late 20th century, I’ve had the benefit of growing up with computers. The mysterious grey or black boxes that somehow manage to take input from a user by way of keyboard or mouse or joystick, and not only re-display that input, but actually process millions of calculations per second on it and output something useful.

As an exercise to the reader, I’d like you to count to 0 to 30 in your head as fast as you can, but time yourself. After you’ve counted to 30, count as fast as possible in your head from 0 to 40. Even in your head, you’re probably looking at between 15 and 30 seconds each time. Now do that twenty-five thousand times. A computer will do that in less than a second. And it’s not even counting which is mindless enough that after a while you wouldn’t even have to think about it; it’s doing instructions which are different damn near all the time.

“So now here we are stuck in the delta, addicted to information we cannot even digest.”

Of course we’re addicted to information. Isn’t that what the information age introduced us to? The news organizations became the new pushers, and their readers were faithful junkies who needed a constant fix of their favorite drug. Instead of spiking up your arm and leaving trackmarks on your forearm, today’s addict leaves lines in their company’s firewall logs.

What’s even more interesting though is how information gathering has gone from a passive (or pull) exercise, to a completely active (or push) exercise. What do I mean by that? Well let me explain. 5 years ago, the information age was booming. Left and right, you had websites that had all of the latest news about business or sports or entertainment (or any combination). You had the main portals like CNN.com or Yahoo.com which carried feeds from all the major news wires live on their website. The problem with that form of retrieval is that you had to constantly had to refresh the page to see if there were any new stories.

Enter RSS feeds. While I could get incredibly technical and probably lose the last 2 readers who occasionally read this page, I’ll give a quick rundown which will hopefully explain it but not bore you to death. RSS feeds are a feature that more and more sites are offering their users, which allows them to run a separate program that monitors these feeds. As soon as an update is posted to the site, the RSS reader notifies the user and says “HEY IDIOT, A NEW ARTICLE WAS JUST POSTED!!! LETS GO WASTE MORE COMPANY TIME AND READ IT!!!” and it conveniently provides a link directly to that latest story.

No longer do we have to waste precious time refreshing the same page over and over again; now we just run an RSS reader, add links to all the RSS feeds we can get our hands on, and wait for the updates to be posted.

Even right this second, with this exact blog, I have an RSS feed that you can subscribe to (subscribe is a very loose term when it comes to RSS; it simply means to add the feed address to your reader) where you can be updated every time I post another one of my rants about absolutely nothing. I’m also going to be “pushing” information as soon as I finish writing this article, as I’ve set up my blog software to notify Hazen’s blog as soon as I quote it for the purposes of this very article.

So would submitting information about information to another site about information be considered “recursive information swapping”?

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m in IT; I am absolutely addicted to information. I not only have to keep up with the latest tools and techniques for my job, but let’s face it: 99% of IT people love (or at least one point loved) computers. I have a tab on my web browser constantly open to Google’s RSS reader which keeps me up to date on all the latest and greatest toys in the computer world (courtesy of Engadget, ZDNet, and The Register’s RSS feeds), what’s happening in Calgary (courtesy of Google’s customized news reader feeds) and on some of my friends’ blogs. I am absolutely an information junkie of the highest order.

The only problem I see is that at some point, without having our brains directly wired to the internet, we’re only going to be able to take in so much at one time. You can only read so fast, and even beyond that, your brain can only comprehend so much data in a given period of time, before it needs a break to actually process that information. I realize that people around me are just as addicted to information, and that to keep up, I must keep myself addicted too. Falling behind the curve is something that is rarely ever recovered from, and the last thing I want to do is piss all over my meal ticket.

There are definitely days when I am (and I’m sure you are, too) just sick of the constant barrage of data that we are expected to absorb on a minute-to-minute basis. From the second our radio alarms wake us up in the morning with the latest news, weather and sports (sponsored by Purina Dog Chow) to when we get downstairs and read the newspaper (sponsored by the nine thousand ads) and then to work by billboards that almost seem to reproduce nightly (sponsored by Nike). And you’ve only been awake for two hours! I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that I would just like one day a month where I can sit in a completely black room, and just think. There are oh-so many days where I take so much in, my head literally hurts.

Can I score a hit of that information methadone?