Attention Saturation

Fred Wilson has a good post on attention saturation, with this marvelous quote from a cognitive psychologist in 1971:

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." (Computers, Communications and the Public Interest, pages 40-41, Martin Greenberger, ed., The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.)

He asks what number of feeds we can possibly tolerate.  The answer is about 150, the cognitive limit of our mental capacities to track social relationships.  Sure, we can have more sources of information.  But in abundance, we will rely on our social networks as the filter.  Good thing we keep passing the good stuff along so we can drop reading the rest.

The one counter trend I can come up with is media selection theory, where old media is never forgotten for the new.  I happen to disbelieve it when the cost of a media saturate itself, such as with spam in email.  This has yet to be proven out, of course, but at least has tipped the scale towards, say, feeds.

Comments

[J Wynia]

That number assumes you're treating your feeds as a "social network" and social relationships rather than just content sources. If I was away from my aggregator (actually a designated IMAP email account), I probably couldn't list more than 10-15 of the feeds in my ~250 subscriptions (growing quite quickly).

I generally subscribe to a site when I've read 2 or 3 good posts on it, often on my only actual visit to the site itself. If those few posts are interesting, I hit "RSS Subscribe" in my sidebar and close the site. From there, any new posting becomes one of a pile of articles I sift through every day based on the content.

Maybe my attitude toward it is influenced by the fact that my aggregator doesn't actually put your postings together unless I specifically request the "by author" view.

I don't forsee any more problem dealing with that number growing to 2500 or more than I did when my email influx went from 5 a day to 500.

Obviously you can't use the same approach on large numbers of sources that you did with only a few. That's where the growing pains are happening for this stuff.

People who had a close network of blogs that they treated as a family can't treat the 3rd hundred blogs added to their subscriptions as family or necessarily even as close friends. You just need better approaches to picking out what you're looking for.

In case you're curious, your posting was flagged for my attention under my "attention OR information+overload OR information+saturation" filter that was created for a book I'm working on on the subject. I'll also be flipping the "commented" flag on the post so I can easily revisit any responses that may be posted.

[Amy Gahran]

Hi, Ross.

I'm with J. Wynia on this one. Feeds can be a way to maintain connections, social-relationship style. But they also can be simply reference tools or content sources, too.

For instance, in my feed reader (Sage, a Firefox extension), I currently have nearly 500 feed subscriptions. These are sorted into folders.

At the top of my list are the approximately 30-40 feeds in my "must read" folder. These are content sources (blogs, publications, organizations) that are of current or ongoing significant interest to me. This list shifts daily with my interests and with new discoveries. Generally, as a new feed captures my interest, I bump one which has become less interesting.

I also maintain a folder of current topical searches, which deliver items from a variety of sources that match saved source criteria at places like Technorati, Google News, etc. Right now I only have 10 of those.

And of course I have a folder for "ego surfing," so I can monitor how my name or weblog (http://contentious.com) is popping up in the public conversation.

Finally, I have 30 folders where I put all my other feeds, categorized by topic.

Usually, if a resource has a few interesting items, I'll check it out for a few days in my "must reads." If I decide to keep it, it'll eventually bump down into my topical folders. I don't check these every day, but I prefer to subscribe to feeds rather than make a bookmark because a bookmark tells me very little about why I might be interested in a site. I turn up a lot of surprising gems this way.

So the number of feeds I actively monitor falls well within your limit of 150. However, for me it would be counterproductive to avoid subscribing to more than 150 feeds. Thbere are just too many ways I can use that information. I love serendipity.

- Amy Gahran
Editor, Contentious