My subject this morning is the somewhat rebarative one of feeds. “Feeds” is an ancient news term that signifies the contents of reports, formerly received by the newsroom in teletype form, from various news services, such as the Associated Press and Reuters. The clatter of the teletype machines was so completely the music of broadcast journalism that it was often used as a theme to introduce news programs. The machines printed the reports on fanfold paper, basically a very, very long strip of cheap foolscap pleated in 11-inch folds and packed in a corrugated box. In my early radio days, I found it was quaint and charming to type letters on fanfold paper; happily, most of this juvenilia will have crumbled to dust by now.

Do you remember how, back in the Eighties and Nineties, before personal computing achieved the look and feel that has stabilized over the past fifteen years, computer keyboards clattered intriguingly whenever a character (usually a detective or his proxy) had to sit down and use one? Sometimes the operating systems were equally fantastic. Compare Outland with Copycat — and remember that Outland was set in the future.

The thrill of the teletype racket was that something was happening, something with an industrial feel: news was being produced! Whether you were paying attention or not, reams of news poured forth from the shaky platens. Today’s personal computers are somewhat disappointing in this regard. Oh, they’re always doing plenty of things that you can’t see, and wouldn’t want to see; but to you, the user, they appear to be doing nothing but waiting for you to type in the next instruction, and this creates an unpleasant lonely feeling. We’re all so connected, as they say, but that’s not what it feels like.

Reading feeds on Google Reader would be much more pleasant if they added the chug of the old teletype machines as a personal option. By providing the cascade of incoming updates with an aural signal, the reader, thus improved, would probably reassure us on some hunter-gatherer level, instead of leaving us feeling woefully snuck-up-upon. There needs to be compensation for the fact that the news service that provides your reader with feeds is something that has to be cobbled together by you. You have to decide whether or not to “subscribe” to each and every blog that might or might not prove to be interesting over time. I subscribe to about 150 blogs (I guess). Every time one of the blogs to which I subscribe sprouts a new entry, a corresponding feed is noted (by a number in parenthesis) on the subscription list at the left side of the pane. When the total number of feeds that I haven’t looked at exceeds a thousand, the application stops counting, so that it can take quite a while, on Monday mornings, to bring the total below “1000+”. Quite a demoralizing while.

Yesterday, I spent several hours glancing through feeds. I tried very hard not to read any; the idea was to make up my mind about interesting stories on a quick, intuitive basis, leaving the reading and sifting and thinking for later. Later, meaning today, I will peruse the “starred items” on the iPad, spending several more hours but in a completely different mental atmosphere. In terms of Daniel Kahneman’s fast and slow thinking, I’m dividing the Type 1 jobs from the Type 2 jobs. Whether I’m any good at this remains to be seen.

It’s a pity that feeds aren’t more uniform. Many feeds completely reproduce the blog entry that the reader application is reporting. I believe that, if you set your reader to “subscribe” to this site, there won’t be any need to visit, because the reader will give you the entire content, complete with image. What it won’t give you is the formatting; as a rule, feeds are harder to read. That’s why I recommend subscribing to The Daily Blague, where the entries are rarely more than two sentences long and a link is provided to the full text here. Brief feeds are always best, precisely because they don’t invite you to linger. Flag or don’t flag, but keep moving.

I also wish that Google Reader were more adjustable. Or that there were a comparable app with a (reasonable) pricetag that would allow me to manage feeds more effectively. Take those “starred items,” for example. There’s no way to remove the stars in batches, resulting in the pile-up of dead information. (It’s inconceivable that archeologists of the future will ever tackle the the middens of our discarded choices.) I try to remove the star of every item that I “use” in putting the Beachcombing entry together, but if you ask me I oughtn’t to have to make the effort. Where’s all this automation that we hear so much about?

As to why I bother to read feeds, that’s an entirely different matter. I can’t possibly bear to think about the experience of reading feeds, which is what I’ve tried to do here, and the reason(s) for reading them at the same time — it’s too crushing.

***

Every once in a while, a great treat pops up in the feeds — something both delightful and unexpected. I was lucky enough to have such a treat yesterday. I was glancing over the feeds for Nigeness, a blog kept by an English gentleman of a certain age who works in London (in the City, presumably, but this is not discussed) and who lives in Surrey somewhere (or in a neighboring county). Nige is fond of long walks, and he’s a keen amateur lepidopterist — how nice for today’s butterflies it must be, to live in an age of digital capture. Yesterday’s treat was encountered on one of Nige’s less beaten paths, and involved the very British humor of Berlin-born Gerard Hoffnung. I knew all about the Hoffnung “music festivals,” but I didn’t know a thing about his fake radio interviews, when he would put on his “bufferish” act, impersonating a blitheringly self-important twit twice his actual age. I’ll let Nige himself tell you the rest; click through to YouTube from there. Prepare to weep.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2012 at 10:58 am.