What I Read

I ran across The Atlantic’s series asking pundits what they read. I’m not pundit, but hey…I thought it’d be a good feature for me. Naturally, it’ll start with what I read and will probably dovetail into what I’m listening to, since if you’ve followed me at all over the years you know there’s probably something playing in the background.

The Atlantic’s feature starts like this and I’ll answer mine with the same prompt: How do people deal with the torrent of information pouring down on us all? What sources can’t they live without?

I wake up around 6:30am or so. When I do, I usually resist trying to read anything until after I’m ready for work. Because I live less than two blocks from work, there’s no real commute and so, I just wait until I get into the office to catch up on things. I heavily rely on Google Reader and Twitter to get the pulse of what’s happening. Hacker News is an underrated source and because I have blogs there, Tumblr usually ends up being on my radar too. I read local papers too.

The New York Times and The Atlantic mobile apps are on my iPad and I read them pretty regularly. I don’t rely on friends for their social news recommendations, as much as I take their cues and then end up surfing on my from. You know how link will take you to 30 others? That’s pretty much how I operate these days. If you’re not careful, you can get sucked into an internet vortex and not come out. So I try to pattern my reading for certain periods of the day and if I miss something, so be it. So it’s usually at the beginning of the day, around lunchtime on the iPad and maybe if there’s downtime later in the day.

I post on Twitter a lot more than I do on Facebook during the day. A lot of this owes to the audiences I subscribe to and because I just prefer the former to the latter. Still, I’m not as prolific as I once was. I’m okay with this. I’m retrofitting a lot of my online presence because it’s been three years or so with this current iteration of things. So post-work time these days especially has been spent plotting those moves and making them.

On the book front, I strongly prefer print books. But the iPad Kindle app is just great. I just finished Scorecasting and I’m currently reading the much bandied about The Art of Fielding and just started The Darwin Economy and Cognitive Surplus. The thing that it’s always been great for is as a kitchen tool. It’s my unofficial sous chef when I’m making new things ; which I do a lot especially since finding out a few months ago that an allergic reaction I had from camp this summer was actually gluten intolerance. Being a huge tea nerd, The Story of Tea is one book that wouldn’t suffice in digital format; I need the actual hard cover coffee table edition.

There’s no shortage of things to keep myself engaged. What I find most liberating is when I can shut down all of the consumption to block off time to write or to read. I think for many of us self-styled pundits, there’s a penchant to want to read-react-respond to things. I absolutely hate internet comments on news stories. It’s the worst thing to happen to media. I’m sure it can help gather a pulse on what the community things, but there was decorum in Letters to the Editor that internet comments absolutely lack. Some exceptions to the rule exist, but it’s easily my least favorite thing online.

Ultimately, I’m trying to be more thoughtful in my own commentary and I think the more you read and ponder, the easier that gets.

Goodbye Google+

I deleted my Google Plus account yesterday. Mostly because I didn’t see a place for it within my current communication landscape. I’m sure there are folks who will say that this does not matter, because it’s there and we should use it. But I view distribution platforms as extensions of my personal presence online. Every time someone goes to LinkedIn or Facebook (ha ha, you can’t) or Twitter to find out what I’m riffing on, it’s just one more place that I’m less likely to show them what I want them to see.

What do I mean? Well, it’s not an issue so much right now. But when you’re actively on the market and want people to discover the talents that make you interesting or worth knowing, it can be very difficult to get that picture from the constraints imposed by social networking sites. Despite my ubiquity online, I’ve always been very hesitant to share casually without really knowing my audience. On some level, I don’t really care. But I can’t deny that it plays a part in my calculus at times and makes it hard for me to know how I want to communicate.

So as I thought more about G+ and what I was doing with it, I realized that there existed a true failure to really launch. I’m sure that if I dove in more readily, there would be opportunities for growth and perhaps a wellspring of interestingness to be discovered. But the truth is, that all takes time. And I’m not entirely convinced that expending lots of energy merely cultivating networks in the off-chance that someone, somewhere might someday be useful — seems fine for folks who are wired in that way. But that’s not me.

There are things about it that I liked. I thought it was great that privacy settings were flexible. Circles were nice enough, though onerous in their own way — except, it was new so there were less folks to add — and I thought the fact that there is so much less noise than Twitter is a huge advantage. And lots of interesting people I didn’t follow on Twitter were there actively sharing.

I do my best work face to face. You don’t really understand what I’m about until you see me in action. Can I articulate what I translate into when it matters? You betcha. But I think for many people, it’s a lot better to spend your time living and thriving within the confines of what you do well; rather than looking around at the follow me economies of scale online and wonder how to get involved in the action.

It’s a personal choice and I decided to put the eject button.