Infoverload
Lately I've been noticing that the more blogs I read, the dumber I feel (and the worse my writing and thinking get). Are blog - like a lot of journalists and editors argue - info junk food?
Last week, I had a bit of a hiatus, after working for a solid month on 2 big presentations, researching multiple sectors with >50 firms each, and trying to analyse the economics of 3 new technologies. It was a heavy month, and I found that relying on blogs did raise my productivity...
...In the sense that I got more stuff done faster. But in few days off, I noted that:
1) I don't
feel a deep knowledge in the stuff I worked on, like I have done with other forms of media
2) My brain hurts from all the crapfiltering I had to do
3) I found it really difficult to trawl the latest econlit, because it felt like I had a pseudo attention ADHD.
I might be exaggerating a bit, but I am gonna change my info diet this month and see if thing work out differently. Needless to say, short-term productivity at the expense of long-term knowledge is a Faustian bargain.