{"id":126,"date":"2008-08-22T13:46:03","date_gmt":"2008-08-22T19:46:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/?p=126"},"modified":"2008-08-23T11:32:19","modified_gmt":"2008-08-23T17:32:19","slug":"its-all-too-much","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/2008\/08\/22\/its-all-too-much\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;It&#8217;s All Too Much&#8221;: How to Deal with Information Overload?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;d done recently on using technology in the classroom, &#8220;I wish I didn&#8217;t even know about all that. It&#8217;s all too much!&#8221;  Another colleague lamented, &#8220;I have no time to learn about the Internet.  I work 80 weeks as it is, <em>and<\/em> I have a family!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8211; and unnecessary &#8211; task.  I&#8217;ll write more about what I see as the &#8220;necessity&#8221; of it some other time, but for now, I just want to talk about how it might be less daunting. <\/p>\n<p>Some of the new technology out there can make keeping up with the rest of the information possible.   Here&#8217;s one tool, &#8220;RSS,&#8221; explained in &#8220;plain english&#8221; along with some handy visual aids (about 3 minutes from the folks at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.commoncraft.com\/about\">CommonCraft<\/a>):<\/p>\n<p><object width=\"425\" height=\"344\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/0klgLsSxGsU&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1\"><\/param><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\"><\/param><\/object><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;d done recently on using technology in the classroom, &#8220;I wish [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[538,128,539,308],"class_list":["post-126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-information-overload","tag-rss","tag-tools","tag-video"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":140,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions\/140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}