In the past year I’ve significantly changed how I handle the media I consume in my life.
Reading
Hello changes! I’ve made more changes with what and how I read than any other media.
Online content
I’ve started using my RSS reader to its full potential, beyond just individual blogs and news sites, I now subscribe to multiple tech planets, livejournal (rather than using the /friends page) and other content including comics (xkcd, sinfest, Garfield), podcasts and flickr photo feed. I spend more time reading feeds these days but the benefit of being that much more in touch with various aspects of things I’m involved with (friends, open source, local content) has made the investment of time worth it and I have whole folders I can just “mark as read” if I don’t have the time. If it’s an online publication and not in my RSS reader, I’m probably not reading it.
Beyond RSS I’m obviously reading all kinds of other stuff all day, from social media to traditional emails. On the social media end I’m currently using Seesmic’s web interface to watch Twitter and Facebook updates, but I don’t read everything, selecting just a few close friends to follow diligently. It would be nice if Google+ had an API instead of having to watch the feeds in a browser or Android app, so for now I keep it up in a browser tab and glance at it when I have the time and inclination. Email is a challenge, I read everything that comes into my Inbox almost immediately and messages from a select number of mailing lists, but the vast majority are included in a once a week (or more likely, twice a month) browse through to review interesting things and then ignoring the rest. This is actually working out pretty well, and the regular clean out of the less important lists means I’m at least giving myself the opportunity to be exposed to the information even if I don’t have time to always take advantage of it.
Books
This year I left behind paper books. I love paper books and for a long time I rationalized having so many because I’d re-read them, loan them to friends and that I simply liked the feel of paper books. It turns out that I don’t read books for fun as much as I used to so the thought of spending time re-reading most books seems silly now. Loaning books, how often did I really do that? Not often. Feel of the book? It’s a nice luxury but it’s just that. The arguments against paper books kept piling up, particularly as I started traveling more. How many books should I bring for this trip and how much weight and space do they take up? What if my luggage gets wet? Where will I put all these books in our 800 sq ft condo? I bought a Nook in January and haven’t looked back at paper books except for technical reference (generally I still find sitting a physical book on my desk and being able to flip through it much better for my workflow than navigating a PDF or ebook). I have to admit I do mourn my massive wall of books that are now downstairs in storage, but it’s simply not practical anymore.
Magazines
I now subscribe to more magazines. Wait, what? With all this technology what am I doing with a larger pile of magazines? I never had much of an opinion about magazines until I moved most of my life to digital and realized that there are lots of things to love about magazines. Articles are relatively short, they are highly portable, cheap and don’t require power (stolen or lost while on sketchy subway? No big deal), they are disposable and date sensitive (damaged on the beach? No big deal). I subscribed to 2 more magazines this year (National Geographic and Bay Nature), bringing my subscription total to 5 (Linux Journal, Communications of the ACM, Discover) and I regularly buy individual issues while traveling.
Watching
When I moved here we didn’t have a TV, everything we watched was through our computers. We bought a television last summer and it shipped with Netflix and Hulu support. Now since we can always just hook up a computer to it and feed it whatever we want, apps weren’t much of a consideration when buying the television, but we now almost exclusively these apps for our television watching needs and all we use a computer for is for MediaTomb to serve music and movies via UPnP over the network.
With the launch of Android apps for Netflix and Hulu for my Nexus One I can now watch on the go or from the comfort of my bed. Pretty cool.
Listening
This is actually the one place where there haven’t been any changes. There are now several services which you take advantage of varying degrees of “have access to your own stuff and listen from anywhere” but I haven’t jumped on the bandwagon. I still just use my little mp3 player and load up podcasts and mood-reflecting music. This is partially due to the circumstances under which I listen to portable music are largely offline: at the gym (no signal in there), on the subway, on planes.
It would be interesting to hear how others handle their media these days, I’m sure I could make improvements.