As usual, when I read Seth Godin, he highlights something that I have been thinking about, but didn’t know how to put in words.

And so we came to treat incoming data as precious. A lost email was a calamity. Reading everything in your RSS feed was essential. What if I miss something?

A new generation, one that grew up with a data surplus, is coming along. To this cohort, it’s no big deal to miss a tweet or ten, to delete a blog from your reader or to not return a text or even a voice mail. The new standard for a vacation email is, “When I get back, I’m going to delete all the email in my box, so if it’s important, please re-send it next week.”

This is what always happens when something goes from scarce to surplus. First we bathe in it, then we waste it (The Shower of Data).

I’ve increasingly become the same way. I used to spend hours going through every article in my RSS feed, and carefully selecting who to subscribe to (or unsubscribe from). Now, I ruthlessly skim 300+ articles in less than 15 minutes, and usually just mark everything as read and move on.

It also reminded me of how Islamic knowledge gets treated in our times. There’s a certain level of arrogance among beginning students of knowledge to look at a certain website and see hundreds of thousands of hadith all compiled in one place. This is a level of information and access that scholars before did not have. We pull up in a 3 second google search what many of them may have traveled by months to hear just once – and be forced to memorize it immediately because it’s not exactly easy to “look it up” again. The appreciation for what they had was probably also a key contributor to the level of insight they had.

I personally feel like the access to information also creates somewhat of an addiction. I’m constantly seeing who is emailing me what, or whats new on my RSS list, twitter, and so on. I’ve taken the first step and turned off 90% of the notifications on my phone, now its time to trim the actual information that I need to consume so I can properly understand and value what I’m taking in, instead of just being a donkey carrying books.