Chapter 13 – How do I get rid of the clutter and noise?

Whenever my dad looks at Twitter, Facebook or even the NYTimes.com, he always comes back to me with one question: how do I get rid of all the stuff I don’t like?

Apparently being inundated with wave after wave of ideas, links and hashtags doesn’t appeal to him like it does me, or perhaps his brain can’t handle it all (doubtful on the latter). Or maybe, just maybe, our web experience has shifted from abundance to over-abundance, and that we need to develop filters to deal with everything we read.

I’m a serious information junkie. In between my Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts, combined with my RSS reader and email subscriptions that send me curated content, I read more now than I did when I was a kid, and I used to carry a novel with me wherever

I went.

At times, it’s overwhelming. The onslaught of information on so, so many subjects is crack to my information-ready brain. While I’ve found ways to tone down much of appears to me in digital form, I often catch myself thinking: “Why am I reading this? None of this matters to me in any meaningful way. Do I really need a 2k word breakdown of Ric Flair’s career?”

While my reasons for knowing this kind of thing jibe with Patton Oswalt’s outlook on life experience, namely this quote: “I want to experience as many different tastes, sights, emotions, conflicts, and cultures as possible, so that I can expand the canvas of my memory and enrich my comedy”, I know that too much of anything can’t be good. And too much of everything is very, very bad.

To reduce the noise, I stopped following people who talked about issues that don’t interest me. For example, I used to follow an activist blogger who routinely wrote and talked about issues in the Middle East and Arab countries. While her insight was fascinating,

I found myself engaging with the content far more often than is reasonably prudent. While I do think it would behoove me to know more about civil rights struggles in developing countries (or developing democracies), that kind of knowledge makes my popular at parties but does nothing to help my daily work. So I unfollowed her.

But I still read her blog.

And that’s the secret. We have so many ways to keep with people that we no longer need to follow every subject via every medium. I don’t need to keep track of the same people via Twitter, their blogs and Facebook, it’s okay to cut out a few. It’s also okay NOT to follow people that routinely annoy you, no matter how great their content may at times be.

Why most of us would think that too much information can never be a bad thing, I implore you to take note of what social media and sharing has turned the web into: a collection of disparate voices all yelling for attention.

Surely we can do something about that. We can choose what NOT to listen to.