I was pondering whether to write this post, for fear that it would turn into yet another plaintive whine littering the Internets, but you know what, I think this is important enough to whine about. So here goes:

I just spent this entire evening of 5 hours doing nothing but sifting through the Internets instead of getting things done. (There, didn’t that sound suitably whiny? Anyhow.) Usually when I come home from work, I expect to Get Things Done, and by that I mean draw in my sketchbook or make progress on any of the 5 projects I have going or learn some more AS3 or finish a book. But instead, tonight, I read Google Reader. I read Google Reader’s 1000+ unread entries for 5 hours straight, interspersed with link-swapping via IM and Twitter-monitoring. While Blipping songs. And Wikipedia-surfing. And petting the cat.

Judging by tonight and the frequency with which tonight’s scenario has occurred over the past 3 months, I have pretty much become Web 2.0′s bitch. But now is not the time to feel self conscious about having potentially earned a new stereotypical designation. Now is the time to think carefully about why I do this, why I feel compelled to sacrifice hours of my life at a time to basically what amounts to info-hoarding.

Actually, I think that’s the core of the reason: I do this because I feel an imperative to info-hoard like none other. And I feel this imperative because I’ve come to believe (and been taught to believe) that, in order to be a truly inspired producer of cultural capital, to be a damn excellent artist or designer or whatever you want to call it, I must first and foremost be extremely well-informed. About everything from molecular gastronomy and its impact on European urban tourism to the mating rituals of the lesser paradise fowl. Because you never know—inspiration pops out of the most unexpected stimuli. Perhaps out of vast reserves of raw knowledge, some rare and lovely wisdom will crystallize.

(Thinking this, believing in this, has become so second-nature to me that I am almost positive I have already blogged about this before, but the blog search engine tells me nothing so far has been written. So onwards I go.)

This is what fuels my Google Reader marathons. But invariably after these, I feel tired and not at all like I have learned much of anything. For a while I was pondering why this is so. I can’t help but feel that at least part of it is due to the fact that my brain does not retain fleeting facts or topics very well. Some people seem to be able to capture and store a great percentage of the topics that pass their way each day. I’m not one of them. I usually read, react, and soon after forget.

But then I realized that not many people who go on visits to the blogosphere read to retain—it is far more likely that they read to entertain. Rather than look for stuff and then try to incorporate it into their way of thinking forever, most people probably just have a good chuckle or raised-eyebrow moment, and then let it go. My other friend Eileen says she keeps a category labeled “bored” in her Google Reader, and this is by far her biggest category. Whereas, come to think of it, I am never really bored—I am never really bored because web-hopping feels less like a casual last-ditch way to pass the time and more like a monumental task, like reading 12 chapters before you go to bed. Even while I have fun doing it, it is nevertheless fuelled with the imperative to learn, learn and hoard and incorporate, so that one day I can become as smart as Stephen Sagmeister or as perceptive as John Maeda or as witty as Paula Scher.

But it doesn’t work. Ask me if I recall even 5 things that I saw within the past hour. Five is the below-average standard for items cached in short-term memory. I can recall only two. Ready? Fountain throwies and World Builder video from Vimeo.

This is what you get, Tina, from self-imposed force-feeding.

Oy vey. Maybe this is not the right way to do this.

I am pretty much an impatient person when it comes to self-expectations. This is probably my biggest problem on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes impatience is warranted—you kind of need it on the job if you want to complete something on time in a programming language you barely know—but other times it’s a big handicap, and I need to get better at recognizing when it is.

So all this rambling has lead me to the conclusion that my mega-surfing sessions need to be… made less mega. I can’t have too much at once, because if so, I find myself so frantic to ingest that I barely digest, and as a result, after five hours, there isn’t much to show for it. Whereas if I’d spent the five hours drawing in my sketchbook, learning the Renaissance-y way through painstaking hand-drawn gestures and notes, I’d retain a lot more, and have some wonderful sketches to show for it. Or if I’d read a book on any one single topic… sigh.

But I still need at least some of the crazy variety that the internet offers.

This raises the question of how to possibly take in the internet (and the world, by proxy) in small enough chunks.

It is (they are) so, so, soooooo big.

Oh man, thinking about that kind of size makes my knees feel weak, like standing in an endless field and experiencing some kind of horiontal acrophobia.

Perhaps that is a question for an other day. I’m tired, and tomorrow there is work. Off to bed!

EDIT: Tangentially related article about design’s place in the world of information – “not everything is design, but design is everything.”