Thing 4

"It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of blogs out there - how do you handle information overload and how do you think RSS might help with that?"

I suspect that the same criteria I share with my students during information literacy sessions will guide me through the littered information landscape that the blogosphere no doubt contains. We rely on these core four principles: currency, relevance, bias and authority. RSS is a tool that I will use to put the blogs I encounter to these tests. RSS, by default, arranges new strands within feeds chronologically. Insofar as relevance is concerned, RSS seems agnostic on this count. With reagrd to bias and authority, I am certain that these are rarely evident early in my subscription to a particular feed. Circumstances and contexts will reveal whether the authors I am following are worthy of my trust and whether my worldview and theirs are truly congruent. I do not expect to agree with everything that I read. Still, I want the opinions and statements that I weigh to be coherent, reasoned, persuasive, witty, compassionate and charitable.

RSS highlights the difference for me between online and print literacy. I like to re-read print books all the time and I worry that blogs will never rise to the print standard I have set for myself. I can only imagine reading a blog once even if I follow a particular author's feed. While I may be enamored with an online author's style, I have yet to come across digital creations that are memorable the way La Chute by Albert Camus ot the The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot are memorable for me. With RSS, I feel like I am sorting through newspaper clippings in folders and grudgingly giving my attention to ephemeral things. It makes me thirst all the more for ageless wonders.