Stop. Think. Repeat.

Blogs
Podcasts
Vlogs
YouTube & Blip.tv
Google

Pick any of these things and you're presented with a stream of content the likes of which have never before been so easily accessible to so many people around the world. And these are just a precious few. You can, through just one or two of these things get hold of enough content to last you through just about any day. Heck, there are even podcasts and websites dedicated to indexing the 'best' of the internet for you (The Daily Nut, Popurls, etc...), so you can go to just one spot and get the 'best' from several others.

So what?

So, this: When is so much content being taken in, too much? We spend much of our time clicking and scrolling through website after website, with a podcast or music playing in the background, and the tv on across the room - that we're not doing the thing that all these content streams are asking us to do: think about what we're reading, hearing, and seeing.



For me, this is a big problem - and so I've made the difficult decision to trim down my podcast subscription list, and tweak the bookmark folder that houses links to the blogs I read daily. I've done this, not because I suddenly don't care about what those sources of content have to say, but because I want to spend more time analyzing- not just absorbing - what the sources remaining on my radar have to say. I want to reflect on, and not regurgitate, the content I open myself up to. *(note: this isn't to say that I won't still search for paparazzi photos of Jessica Biel, and videos of frat boys smacking each other with 2x4s - because we need our idiot time, too).

In this day and age of free content, related to just about any topic you're interested in, it's very tough to say 'no'. The onus falls upon us as consumers to determine what merits a source has, if any, and to devote ourselves to not just reading, watching, and listening - but to stopping, and thinking.


See you in the funny pages...