After cooking my 3 course dinner in 3 1/2 minutes, using my electric toothbrush that promises only a minute of scrubbing is needed, and waiting 4 minutes for an album to finish downloading because my internet was being slow, I laid back and opened The Economist. Not too much later I checked my watch and couldn't believe my eyes. A whole three minutes had passed and I was just getting to the bottom of the first page.
While everything else is moving along faster, and faster, the art of reading has kept its pace like a disciplined runner. While the information you get is being hunted and gathered at an unprecedented rate, the mental digestion process hasn't changed a bit. And like food, data spoils and is best eaten fresh.
When up to the minute information is just too fast for the "wait a minute" reader like myself, something needs to change. I started skipping some articles in the publications I subscribe to recently, a practice I pledged to avoid. Reading two week old economic indicators, and hearing about how Dominique Strass Kahn can get a little touchy for the fourth time in a row, I couldn't help but notice how so much information has such a short shelf life. As new issue upon new issue piled up, I found myself rushing through articles like they were instructions to diffusing a ticking time bomb. I was reading more, understanding less, and mispronouncing a lot of words in my head. To my dismay, I would get to a new issue and find articles similarly crafted, and changed only in that they were more updated. I had to question my approach and figure out a new way to read.
What I've begun to do is look at "Contents" pages of magazines I haven't gotten to and trying to have a more balanced reading diet. I found in most cases that just reading an article from the latest issue did fairly well at covering all the preceding issues and was far more efficient. Of course the unfortunate side of this is the missed anecdotes, unappreciated verbal flourishes, and undiscovered interpretations that come along with such a diet. For someone who appreciates alliteration as much as apple pie, it's just a bit like missing out on dessert.
Data is coming out faster. This doesn't only mean more of it is available, but also that more of it is pointless. Some information is only worth it when it's fresh off the press or out of the proverbial oven. Current events isn't always best read like a novel. As dinners are getting zapped to pseudo-perfection in minutes, and movies streamed in seconds, the opportunity cost of old fashioned reading is sky-rocketing. Not only can you do more than ever in the time that it takes to read a page on your favorite news site, but what you might be reading is going to spoil faster. Like obesity became a bigger problem as food was hunted and gathered with new technology, so has information overload. Similarly, as more unhealthy food options became available, data's fast food equivalent is out there and growing. I'm trying different information diets to keep in shape and its a work in progress. If you take a look, you might just find you're filling up on something lacking any nutritional value.
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