If you love the stream, you gotta let it go
Closure is a luxury in a stream-dominated world.
For the better part of 2014, Twitter has been my main source for news and interesting things happening in the ever-changing social/advertising/tech world. It’s also been a place where I’ve fought for closure, in the sense of feeling that I’ve caught up on everything that mattered in the feed that day.
Except I’ve been learning that’s not really possible.
Not without sacrificing either other ways to invest my time (e.g. with actual people in the real world), or becoming a super-selective individual who’s always racing against the clock to meet the daily milestone of having zero unread things on the stream. Basically my strategy to fight FOMO backfired, despite having fulfilled its original goals.
Enter 2015.
Out of an introspection exercise, I dropped Faris a line on this, asking him how can someone who follows 15k+ accounts on Twitter keep up with all that information. His answer:
I don’t think of it as keeping up. I don’t use lists. I think of it as a never ending stream. I watch the stream. (…) I don’t think anyone can keep track of everything.
Talk about disarmingly brutal simplicity of thought.
These last 5 years I’ve spent quite a lot of time thinking about optimal ways to keep up with never ending streams of information. I tried RSS feeds (only to find myself marking “all as read” too often). I tried newsletters (only to have an absolutely cluttered inbox). More recently I tried reducing my Twitter following to a bare minimum, only to find Twitter had suddenly turned into a task rather than a moment of pleasure.
Surely there must be a solution. I don’t know of an ideal one. But I think I might have some clues of what’s finally working for me.
Clue #1: forget absolutes
Nothing works perfectly well if totally migrated to a certain medium. Email, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, LinkedIn… they all serve different purposes. It’s naive to think we can make each of them serve all purposes at all time. That’s not the point. And that’s OK.
Clue #2: forget strict numbers
I thought I could solve the information overload by gradually reducing the top limit for the number of accounts I would follow (started at 300 in April 2014, ended up with 25 by December 2014). Guess what? I was still not satisfied because I still couldn’t keep up with everything. Turns out strict numbers don’t solve for an infinite stream. We’re better off forgetting about them, unless we want to end up following about 5 accounts (which arguably undermines the very principle of having a heterogeneous stream).
Clue #3: “bookmark” what matters, let everything else take care of itself
I know people who love RSS feeds but still visit their favourite blogs’ home pages every day to read the headlines. Or people who use Facebook to keep up with current affairs but ultimately have a religious habit of watching the evening news on TV. Or people who love online news outlets but still buy the actual physical newspapers every day.
And that’s fine because among all the things they could do, they choose to trust a select group of indispensable sources; everything else is a bonus.
So right now I’m choosing to stick to a curated yet uncontrolled Twitter feed out of which I have a list for the social media news I definitely can’t do without. Everything else is a bonus for when I choose to read the main stream.
Most importantly, the point isn’t to keep track of all of it, but rather let it surprise me within a certain window of consumption. So far it’s been quite rewarding to use Twitter this way (perhaps as a normal person would?).
[I’m also a big fan of some newsletters from very smart folks such as Neil Perkin, Benedict Evans or Genius Steals; newsletters are a reborn breed having an awesome moment right now.]
The problem isn’t that closure isn’t achievable. It’s that closure isn’t necessarily the thing to achieve. In the age of information overload, we might be better off by setting some rules for the indispensable, and letting everything else take care of itself.
Or in other words, if you love the stream, you gotta let it go.
After all, if Twitter is an ideal platform to form our own scenius, what fun is it if we know exactly what (or who) to expect every single day?
If you found value in this, feel free to recommend it below. You can also follow me on Twitter at @restreitinho.
