2020-05-15

Online Information Diet

Having realized that I've become too information-obese, I've started to get rid of my information flab in especially obese areas in my online information consumption (and production-shmoduction), including, first and foremost, Facebook. I've consulted the following books again - The Information Diet, Digital Minimalism, and Facehooked.

Even before this process I had imposed upon myself one rule, which, of course, I continue to keep - never to check newspapers and newsmagazines on Facebook and now on a smartphone as well. Though I've been checking them through their web feeds by using a feed aggregator (my favorite is QuiteRSS for Windows), which I think is a far more efficient method of checking websites in general, the sheer number of the newspaper and newsmagazine websites I used to check daily simply started to suffocate me. Now I check "only" eight newspapers from five countries in four languages (Globes, Jerusalem Post; Sankei, Japan Times; Gazeta, Moscow Times; Financial Times; Wall Street Journal), which may still seem a lot to many people.

Through this new information diet I'm learning now where else my energy has been leaking online, whether actively or passively. I already feel enormous relief, especially after I blocked the source of my worst energy leak, which, not surprisingly, "happens" to be on Facebook. Of course, each of the individual sub-sources that constitute this source is parve, that is, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with any of them. It's how my mind interprets them that drains my energy. Since the level of my consciousness isn't high enough to stop judging them, I had to decide to limit my exposure to them artificially. I should have thought of this before.

With my switch to a smartphone, which was motivated to make myself more accessible to other people, I'm already facing an unexpected challenge in my new information diet. The number of telephone calls I receive and the number of people who call me have skyrocketted since this switch. In principle, this is a welcome surprise. But unfortunately, I've already started encountering a new mental challenge - how my mind interprets a small number of people who find me more accessible on the phone and call me very frequently to talk mainly or solely about themselves. I only hope it's not too late to set clear boundaries for them, which I was negligent to set in the very beginning.