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As an off-shoot of a side conversation Dan and I have been having here on this post, I got to thinking about the main drawback (in my eyes) of the new “subscription” culture (for lack of a better term) that RSS and the internet in general affords us. Obviously, being able to consolidate the stuff you read and listen to (news particularly) is very convenient, and probably even essential in the days of information overload we live in. The problem is that when there is so much that you have to prioritize what you can read and listen to just for the sake of there never being enough time to read and listen to half the stuff you’d really want to.

While this leads to a very pleasing diet (so to speak) of media consumption, I wonder whether it could be considered a healthy one. To extend the analogy further, no one in their right mind would plan a meal schedule that consisted only of the foods they enjoyed eating the very most, because it would almost certainly lack vital elements that would not make the top of the taste list. Likewise, when we restrict our media input to only what we consciously choose to consume, I can’t help but get the feeling that we will always be missing stuff that we “need” (or should be seeing / hearing), especially the stuff that we can’t imagine or think of being interested in now.

I’m constantly in a state of re-evaluating and trimming my podcast subscription list, because even listening to them for a good number of hours every day while working & driving, there are still too many out there to keep up with. One discipline I’ve had to force myself to maintain is to as it relates to this post is listening to the radio every now and then to hear stuff that I haven’t pre-selected and may hopefully catch me by surprise. Of course, when I say that I’m referring to non-commercial radio; I still get the occasional small dose of the mid to right portion of the dial too (since Emma always wants to listen to B95.1 these days), but like any junk food, I tend to try and stay away from the commercial stations whenever possible.
After going through a recent round of cleanup on my RSS feeds over the last couple days and starting fresh / caught up with a more manageable sized list, I kind of feel the need to go back out and add a few more blogs and sites I don’t generally agree with to the list, or at least ones that tend to give a wide range of perspectives on the issues.

TV is notably lacking from this list and I don’t feel too bad about being “unbalanced” in leaving that out of my media diet either. It’s generally too inefficient (time-wise) for me to handle, although I will make exceptions for rare shows like Lost.

At first glance, this may seem like another boring tech post, but in my mind it goes a little deeper than that. I think that our culture in general is experiencing this same phenomena (selective media consumption) in a way that was never before possible, and I honestly think it’s a great danger to any society. Considering (even seeking out) other points of view and new information is vital to living together in any context, and maybe my perspective is whacked out but that’s something I see as seriously lacking in our culture today. Whether it’s politics, religion, or any other subject that generally divides us, there is a constant barrage of information in all sorts of formats that strives to hammer home the party line of whatever the source’s side is supporting, and if we embrace those streams that we tend to agree with to the exclusion of the others we are setting ourselves up for division and lack of understanding.