Viswanathan K's Thoughts

My wife doesn’t like the fact that I delete many of the pics on the phone very soon after I take them (I delete even more after I download them to a computer’s bigger screen). And it’s on this filtered content that I crop, zoom and apply the photo app and application filters. Why do I purge so many? Because let’s face it: most of the pics are average or worse, and certainly not the kind I would look back at years later fondly. I want to avoid what photojournalist Kenneth Jarecke describes: “Instead of having a body of work to look back on, you’ll have a sad little collection of noisy digital files that were disposable when you made them, instantly forgotten by your followers (after they gave you a thumbs up), and now totally worthless.” Most people, of course, don’t do that. They just post anything and everything they clicked and applied a filter on onto Facebook or Instagram. After all, isn’t What-I-had-for-breakfast the most common theme on Instagram? I agree with Ted Nym...

In the Internet Age, some complain about information overload: too many mails, tweets, status updates…while others are happy to be in an era where we have access to every conceivable piece of information and point of view, with little or no censorship. Except that both of the above views might just be myths. Or at least that’s the view of these 2 books I will talk about. The first book, The Information Diet by Clay Johnson, argues that since time immemorial there’s been way more information than any one individual can absorb; and thus the only thing that has changed today is the ease of access to information. Now add to that the fact that nobody is forcing you to consume all that information; and the logical conclusion is that the real problem is voluntary information over-consumption! And isn’t over-consumption an easy problem to solve? As the blogger Shane Parrish said: “It is very difficult, for example, to overconsume vegetables.” But is that the entire reality? Some...