Content Binges and Broken Things


From the eagle eye of Lorbus: This Is Broken – where you can send photos of stupid signs, gadgets that don’t work, and other broken things with an explanation of the context. It may fulfil the stated aim – to promote industry awareness of user experience, but it’s strangely appealing as well…I love the idea of collecting broken, illogical, inexplicable, and damaged things, and not just wondrous things.

My online experience is so much about this process of seeking, finding, collecting, remaking, and then remediating things, ideas, and affective associations. In a way, I am curating an exhibition of my own curiosity.

Which reminds me, I meant to note how interesting I found Ashley Benigno’s blogging as bulimia post:

There are days when I feel like I’m suffering from an eating disorder ported to information consumption. Days when I sit in front of my screen and it becomes a door to a world wide-open fridge of stuff beckoning to be stuffed down my media gullet. The desire, the hunger to know drives me to uncontrolled content-binging. Never savouring what I’m reading, watching, looking at. Always ready to bite into the next link, a different book. Change that CD. Change that channel. A broth of unorchestrated tastes found in a miriad different subjects brings to the boil a sense of nausea. No pleasure, no gain, just my mind feeling overweight, saturated in cultural fat. Food for thought deep-fried into laxative dreams. My meta-nausea turns physical. Doubled over by data-cramps, I broadcast my bile and choke.

I’m not sure that information is really “consumed” in this way, at least it doesn’t feel that way to me, but what great writing he’s coming up with lately.

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3 responses to “Content Binges and Broken Things”

  1. yeah, i definitely dont agree with that description of what its like to learn and know and expand yourself mentally.

  2. I think Ashley was describing information overload – when you have just been sitting there far, far too long…I haven’t had enough online time lately to feel that way

  3. i guess. i just dont really fall prey to that. i mean, im online constantly, and i never have too much. i never feel grossed out by information and by learning and exploring. i think its associating that grossness with learning that rubs me the wrong way. certainly there are times i need to just kick back and relax though, yeah