Even if you’re truly effective in  screening unnecessary information, the fact remains that you need time to deal with incoming online information, whether it’s push-mode info (primarily email) or pull-mode info (e.g. RSS feeds). The question is, where does the time come from?

Someone pointed out once that you can successfully manage your RSS feeds, blog updates, Twitter, Facebook, and so on if you give up watching TV. And indeed, giving up television would give many people a significant chunk of time to devote to their online data consumption. TV being what it is, one could argue that it’s a good tradeoff; however, TV isn’t the only data stream you can drop: there is also reading books. And while not reading a newspaper can be harmless if you read the same news online, not reading books is cause for concern.

It seems that it’s all a matter of each individual making their own choice of how to balance these various information streams. Unfortunately, the Internet tends to be rather more assertive in claiming our attention, and its use can become addictive. Books may find it hard to stand up to this competition. They’ve already taken a hit by the arrival of television in the last century; how they’ll fare against the Net remains to be seen. And they also face another problem – with the shrinking attention span of the younger generation, many people no longer have the patience for those longer classic novels like War and Peace…

Let’s hope books survive these changing times!