I came across this article by David Goodman in my Technorati search feed for Instapaper, where he discusses his feed addiction, the “continuous partial attention” it fosters, and his transition to consuming longer content:
Regularly following the feeds of over 60 websites was leaving me in a twitchy state of continuous partial attention.
Thanks for the great article, David. I faced many of the same issues as you with obsessive RSS unread-clearing, and I realized I was spending more time skimming short content and headlines than truly reading anything.
The disconnect
The nature of the feed reader, especially when loaded with many high-volume feeds such as Engadget or Digg, encourages you to keep going and skimming and clicking endlessly to “keep up”. When I’d come across a... Read more