At the recent ASA meetings in Boston, I spoke with several colleagues about some of the interesting stuff going on in sociology and social media/digital media/Internet technology/fill-in-your-favorite-term here. In those conversations, I heard a familiar refrain. One colleague remarked in reference to a presentation I’d done recently on using technology in the classroom, “I wish I didn’t even know about all that. It’s all too much!” Another colleague lamented, “I have no time to learn about the Internet. I work 80 weeks as it is, and I have a family!”

I can sympathize. For those of us working under the usual constraints of a publish-or-perish academic career, multiplied by the demands of a (family) or personal life beyond academia, keeping up with the latest developments in technology can seem like a daunting – and unnecessary – task. I’ll write more about what I see as the “necessity” of it some other time, but for now, I just want to talk about how it might be less daunting.

Some of the new technology out there can make keeping up with the rest of the information possible. Here’s one tool, “RSS,” explained in “plain english” along with some handy visual aids (about 3 minutes from the folks at CommonCraft):