February 22, 2009

TiVo Guilt, Opportunity Costs and more

A brief explanation about 3 months without a blog post: dedicating this blog to music alone is just too limiting. Call it a byproduct of my job navigating the Internet, call it my background in Literature, call it my undying quest for fun-yet-useless facts and articles, but this blog needs to start thinking outside the box of "local music."

Part of my frustration in updating is below: TiVo guilt (or in my case Bookmarking and Google Reader guilt) is what happens when technology gives you seemingly unlimited content choices, but time and the need to sleep give you only so many hours in a day to absorb what you've collected.

I definitely suffer from this, but hopefully the content changes here will alleviate some of that. Does anyone else have this problem? Maybe you've bookmarked 30 sites about Garfield minus Garfield but you don't have time to keep up every day?

clipped from www.cnn.com

"Economists call this 'opportunity costs,' " explains Berens. "You're sitting there and you have to weigh, well, 'I have to watch this thing, because I promised myself when I told TiVo ... I want the whole season of that! Go get it! And go get things like it!' And so you've committed to this decision and it's a burden -- suddenly your relaxation has turned into more work."

"With infinite media, you have infinite choices, and therefore you have infinite opportunity costs," he says. "Your satisfaction index of the thing you actually choose can never be equivalent to the infinite opportunity costs, so we're in this position of being behind the cognitive eight-ball all the time."