deeplyshallow // really simple complication

really simple complication

Lately all of my friends are telling me to stop buying so many movies, and to get Tivo. I tell them I don’t like to watch TV. They tell me it’s commercial-free and I can watch at my convenience. I tell them I like to blow through every episode of a season of a show in one long, caffeine-fueled stretch. They tell me I can record shit on the fly and save it to watch whenever I want. I tell them that pretty soon I’d have a long list of shit that I’d feel obligated to watch, and before long, Tivo would be as crappy as television (which I don’t watch because I hate commercials and because I hate feeling obligated to go home by a certain time to watch something).

The reason I know this would happen is because RSS sucks. Okay, so RSS has nothing to do with television, but the same guiding principle is at work here. For those of you who are even more woefully underinformed than I am, RSS (really simple syndication) is a method of publishing a syndication feed from your web site. I have one for DS, here. Basically it means you can stop visiting a web site all the time, and visit it only when your RSS feeds alert you that it’s been updated. (There’s more to it than that, but it’s not important for this post.)

I used to visit about a hundred web sites every day. It was a lot of fun, forcing Firefox to open a hundred new tabs simultaneously, and then weeding my way through every one of them to see who had updated their site and who hadn’t. I developed a pretty quick system, shutting down any site that looked as if it hadn’t been refreshed with content, and moving on to the next. Occasionally I would have to backtrack, which could get a little tedious.

So I started using Bloglines, an RSS reader, to manage all of these sites. Most of them had RSS feeds; the few that didn’t I crammed into a single bookmarks folder so I could still open them all simultaneously. So I took the plunge, and Bloglines informed me that six web sites had fresh content for me to read. That was nice of them, I thought. So I clicked six links and read six new posts, and then I went on my merry way.

The next morning I logged into Bloglines. At the top of the page, it informed me that there were 127 new posts for me to read. Suddenly reading all of my favorite web sites wasn’t fun anymore; it had become a task I had to churn through each day. I could handle a few new posts here and there, but as the number crawled higher, my spirits crawled lower. It’s now completely depressing to read my favorite sites, because Bloglines has turned it into a chore. I have even less time for keeping up with things these days, given my new work schedule, which means I can’t maintain the pace Bloglines is setting.

So fuck Tivo and fuck RSS. It kind of makes me miss the old days of hand-posting updates to my site, of hand-archiving old entries, etc. Kind of. On the other hand, it doesn’t make me miss the old days of television, because the old days of television mostly sucked. (Except for M*A*S*H, which is timely again, and no less great than it once was.) True, network TV still pretty much sucks, but at least some people seem to be making an effort. Except for me, because sometimes I just don’t know how to stop writing, and I end up muddying my point like an idiot.