I've always been an information junkie. News, trivia, senseless water cooler banter- useless bits of information that I can easily do without- end up grabbing most of my attention. More than white papers, novels and hardcore pieces of serious writing. So much so that pulling off an all-nighter jumping from one link to another online, is not unusual. And owing to my increased obsession with Twitter, this is becoming quite a habit. Plus, with the addition of Quora and Coursera on the list of sites to visit before I hit the sack, there is a colossal amount of information that I'm exposed to.
For over a year now, my day job as a content developer at an e-learning company manages to keep me away from the various media which I'm addicted to. But late nights and weekends are when I foray into the delirious depths of the digital world. More often than not, I find myself in secluded corners of the internet- much farther than where I would've wanted to be. One thing leads to another and tweets from content curators linking to interesting articles from all over the world end up giving me multiple intellectual orgasms.
Then there is the community of Quorans, who take selfless gyaan-sharing to unimaginable heights. Reading an indepth analysis on topics, both mundane and of paramount significance, amazes me and makes me look down upon myself. Sample this question here to understand what I'm talking about, if you've not heard of it before.
While juggling between the various social media, I also like to keep a tab on the MOOC scene online. For the uninitiated, a MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course where professors from the world's best universities deliver free courses on topics ranging from Medical Neuroscience to Canine Theriogenology (that's the branch of science dedicated to studying reproduction in dogs!). To try out some of my favourite MOOC platforms, click here, here or here.
All that, plus browsing through innumerable pages on Facebook and LinkedIn makes up for a mindboggling amount of data. And obviously, retention rates suffer big time. There's always that moment when you want to share what you read last night, but you can't really remember what it was! It's high time we evolved to retain content with better retrieval rates, or at least come up with solutions like bionic flash drives which can be plugged into the brain to transfer data for easier retrieval later!
