A Morning Dose of Bloglines

One of the (many) enjoyable parts of my working day is the half an hour I spend sipping my morning coffee and browsing my Bloglines. My particular aggregation of RSS feeds includes headlines from the world of contemporary art, psychology, dementia, cultural trends, and technology gadgets. And the best thing about it? – the sheer, uncontrolled ‘mess’ of concepts and ideas with which I’m confronted every day.

One moment I’m reading about complex decisions being better left to unconscious, rather than conscious, deliberation – a study showing that consumers are happier with complex products they’ve purchased when their decisions have been made in the absence of deliberate attention. The next moment I’m reading about a California meat distributor cheerfully buying a Picasso original from Costco for $39,999.99 because (I quote) “they just sell the top quality — whatever you buy at Costco, whether it's a washing machine or a vacuum cleaner. I just thought, if it's a Picasso, you can't go wrong." And then there are the 5 Islamic women in Saudi Arabia who, fed up with the severe male domination in their country, have opted to undergo sex change operations so that they can live (what we would consider) a normal life.

It struck me that I like Bloglines for the same reason that I like and need a messy desk – it’s fundamental to the kind of work I do. As I wrote about some while ago, the (apparent) mess of papers, books and magazines on my office desk and floor are actually a holding pattern of multiple, loosely connected facts and ideas - a material trace, if you will, of my current, constantly changing, model of the world. Even the distance between the piles and their position on the desk (or floor) has a loose semantics associated with it.

And now, every morning, Bloglines delivers a fresh, entirely unconnected ‘mess’ of ideas and observations from across the globe – these new bits of information can’t be filed (“where on earth would you put them?") but they get absorbed into the general mental mix for that day. This might result in new and surprising associations being made or significant new concepts being formed. Or it might not. Whatever, it’s certainly better than caffeine as a way of kicking the brain into gear for the day.