When is clicking on a link like choosing a breakfast cereal?
The idea that our consumer society so overwhelms us with choices that ultimately
we're unable to choose has become something of a central cliche in our lives.
It's even the topic of a book: The
Pardox of Choice: Why More is Less, by Barry Schwartz. In one
review of the book we learn that:
Anybody who has ever been inside a supermarket has encountered greater
variety in five minutes than Marco Polo was exposed to in a lifetime. Hundreds
of breakfast cereals stand across the aisle from as many different cookies,
including enough subspecies of chocolate chip to provide the adventurous a new
type each day of the month.
Do encountering over 250 links on Yahoo's main page, or getting thousands of results
from a simple Google search, present us with the same almost paralyzing hesitation
of "what should I do next"? At least to a certain extent, the answer
is probably yes. As a matter of course, bloggers list other blogs that they read,
or peruse, or have been influenced by, offering us the opportunity to view those
blogs as well. Quite frankly, on a regular basis,
I don't think it can be done. I see a lengthy list of blogs running down the right
hand side of a blog, a list that is ostensibly made up of the blogs that influence
the thinking of the particular blog I'm now visiting, and I think to myself -
"no way this person has actually read all of these". In any given month,
I may be able to take a glance at perhaps ten blogs,
and actually read the contents of three or four. More than that, and I'm either
not getting my own work done, or very little, if anything, is going to be seeping
in.
Go to: It's a wonder we find time to write at all,
or
Go to: Participating/Observing?, or
Go to: Who's going to watch?, or
Go to: How many prosumers can fit on the head of cyberspace?