Best efforts

Cory Doctorow forms an interesting analogy about dealing with the firehose of internet information flow:

There was a time when I could read the whole of Usenet — not just because I was a student looking for an excuse to avoid my assignments, but because Usenet was once tractable, readable by a single determined person. Today, I can’t even keep up with a single high-traffic message-board…. I’ve come to grips with this — with acquiring information on a probabilistic basis, instead of the old, deterministic, cover-to-cover approach I learned in the offline world.

It’s as though there’s a cognitive style built into TCP/IP. Just as the network only does best-effort delivery of packets, not worrying so much about the bits that fall on the floor, TCP/IP users also do best-effort sweeps of the Internet, focusing on learning from the good stuff they find, rather than lamenting the stuff they don’t have time to see.

In a lot of ways, I feel the same. Time was, I could be a completist about what I read and listened to: in college I bought every album released by Chicago (and after the first one, they were conveniently numbered) and I set myself the task of reading all the William Faulkner in print. Now, I am content to cherry-pick an author or a band. I really liked Graham Swift’s Last Orders, but I didn’t like his next book that I picked up, so I’m done.