My first version of Voxygen was posted in 1996. It was fun building the most rudimentary webpage and exploring what could be done on the internet. Since then, things have changed so much so that I feel like I’m on another planet. Sometimes I wonder whether not I am suffering from “information fatigue.” Wondering? No…I know I am. I don’t feel the extreme levels of anxiety or sleeplessness that it presumably provokes. I have noticed, however, that I can’t keep up with Facebook — I bookmark hundreds of things my friends post and then spend too much time deleting them without reading any of them because the list is obscenely long. I no longer surf any of my usual reading spots. RSS readers have made blog surfing incredibly easy. The downside, however, is that with a simple click of a button, I flood my RSS reader with blogs that I now feel obligated to keep up with but don’t.
I’ve also noticed how many of my Facebook friends turn to Facebook when they have insomnia. I suspect this is not a good thing. Ages ago when I started gaming online, much was made out of the way that monitors emit ..rays?… light?…waves?.. whatever that keep you awake and depressed in a purely physiological way. Of course I was having too much fun to care. I often Facebook when I can’t sleep and reading all the depressing news links really doesn’t help.
All of this has me reflecting on the hopelessness of maintaining any sort of website. The sheer speed and quantity of information available online makes it a challenge. For some time now I have neglected updating the Haraway page, my links page, and my E-texts page. Although I am committed to maintaining the Haraway pages (without question), I believe it’s time for me to lay my E-text page to rest. With RSS readers, it’s no longer useful to me, which is the whole reason I had it in the first place. The E-text page is a graveyard of dead online journals with lots and lots of empty shelf space waiting for new journals to be added. Yet, ironically, I recognize that those empty shelves will never be spacious enough to hold all the online journals I would like to read.
Time for a book sale.
