Yesterday, I found myself frustrated as I looked at the number of unlistened podcasts in my iTunes queue. With no long plane flights on my immediate radar, where was I ever going to find the time to listen to 16 podcasts! This led me to pondering how my patterns of media consumption, supposedly cutting-edge in their subscriptive nature, had led me awry.
First, a thought experiment. What are your subscriptions? How many newspaper or magazines arrive at your doorstep? How many blogs or podcasts do you subscribe to? What alerts do you get? How many mailing lists are you on? How many shows are on your DVR? How many people do you follow with Facebook feeds or Twitter? As I went through this process, I found that more and more of my consumption was through subscription – and I wondered how happy this “freedom” of subscription was making me.
Let’s remember the old days for a second, when you used to have to type in a web address or click on a bookmark to visit a website. Or a time where you had to be in front of the TV at a certain time (or set the VCR, egad) to catch a show. What about a time when you didn’t know immediately when your friends were breaking up, or you occasionally missed NPR’s Fresh Air because you were doing other things. I’m the last one who is going to make an argument that the past was “better”, that’s not the point; however, it might be useful to consider whether in solving the old problems we simply created a slew of new ones.
Let’s think about information consumption in the old model. Without subscriptions, media flew by you – you had to make time for media, essentially. Maybe you caught two television programs, three radio programs, and visited an average of ten websites regularly. Granted, there were some inefficiencies there, but consider how vastly things have changed. Look at your podcast queue. Look at your DVR queue. Look at how many blogs you have in your feedreader – through the power of subscription, we’ve turned information underload into information overload. As we collectively adopt, how will we deal with the sheer volume of information subscription-based models afford?
This led me to wonder if media becomes primarily subscription based, does that increase the insularity of the consumer? For example, if someone has 300 feeds in their newsreader, the web may seem vast, but 300 feeds in the scope of the entire web is actually quite minuscule. Of course, the counter-argument is that before subscriptions, a human could only pay attention to X people – I realize that. But going forward, as everything becomes a subscription, will it become more and more challenging to look out of our bubble? I think this is a genuine question.
Subscriptions mark a paradigm shift in our information-consumption patterns. Because we can offload the storing and filtering tasks, we can now subscribe to potentially endless information streams. At the end of the day, however, there’s still only so much we can consume. And to that extent, it seems like all of us will have to make peace with our subscriptions and consumption. Looking at those 16 unlistened podcasts in frustration, I simply clicked the “mark as not new” button and freed myself from the obligation. Just because we now can listen to, or read, or watch anything, doesn’t mean we have to. At least for now.
Tags: cognition, information
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
I know what you mean. Sitting next to my lazy-boy, i’ve got 10 unread magazines, from shutterbug to linux journal and ALOT of macbreak and rails podcasts to catch up on (at least 6 months worth). I love it when my schedule is busy, but I have to weed through this stuff sooner or later.
Very interesting post on subscriptions. So, the MyYahoo, Netvibes model is “private/personal” media consumption based while Facebook’s model is “social/friends” media consumption based.
According to you which is more powerful? Seems like the FB model is currently winning. Could there be a “happy” medium between personal subscriptions and friend feeds?
Well, I saw your post only because I have it in my google reader. If I hadn’t subscribed to your blog, I would never have known about this post (altho I suspect it’ll be tagged in a lot of places where I might see it, too).
So this is an example of a subscription broadening the scope of what I read.
– ge
Ge – good point!
I have 107 feeds in my Bloglines. I do mostly ok with those except when I take days off. Occasionally I prune for feeds that are defunct or which aren’t really hitting the spot for me. (This is growing the list while increasing the quality, which is good except…more to read.)
I don’t know how many podcasts are in my iTunes but about 200 episodes I haven’t listened to. (I thought it was ridiculous when there were 80.) Now, several of those, like the massive SXSW sessions, are for when I run out of my regular ones to listen to, which happens sometimes.
Video podcasts get totally neglected because I have to be at my computer to watch them. I don’t have a video iPod and if I did it wouldn’t matter because I don’t ride public transit.
I can’t even talk about my stack of unread Wired and other magazines.
I’m subscribed to probably the same amount of podcasts & blog feeds, but I’m perfectly fine with having thousands of unread, un-listened comments mostly now about something already outdated most of the time. More then the subscription model —witch is not new, and the best way to resolve the inherent “experience good” problem of information: you an only tell if it is relevant once you read it— I rely on:
- easier refering (see the “e-mail” link in G-Reader);
- statistical classification: “This post appears to be relevant to people with similar reading patterns” helping a week, relevant signal to raise fast;
- [not implemented yet for feeds, but I have it for websites] recommendations for new insights;
-[not implemented yet for blogs, but exists for news source] sorting by event, and maybe arguments and opinion soon.
None of this has been sending us into Google-archy so far: what some have seen as a concentrating traffic is wrongly apprehended. I used to know one sceptic about IT (Nick Carr); now most people express their concerns: it’s a good thing, it proves the technology empowers debate.
Good post. I’ve thought for quite a while that the feeds I follow are to the wider world as a terrarium is to a full-blown ecosystem. This is nothing new, though, in a mass media age where we tend to seek out news and opinion sources that we agree with, and feel well informed from the steady flow of affirming information. The same goes for feeds – they don’t make us necessarily better informed, but instead help us manage the range of our interests.
That said, serendipity is critical to a healthy intellectual life. I try to expand the scope of my feeds by making sure that there are aggregators in my aggregator: Metafilter is a good serendipity engine, as are search feeds (their error-prone surprises are often quite welcome). A lot of times I end up skimming and clicking little of what I see in these content collectors, but when something does jump out to me it often pays off.