In this day and age information comes at us constantly. I know this is no great revelation but I think there are times when the amount of information exceeds the ability to process it. I suspect that I am at that point.
I am sitting on my couch looking at my TV. It is off because we are on our way to bed. We spent the evening watching shows that have been recorded on the PVR. We choose to watch TV because we were almost out of room on the hard drive of the PVR and we did not want to lose any prerecorded shows.
The last few nights we have played Oblivion.
I received a train video in the mail today. When I took it out of the package, I placed it by the DVD player. This is where I place videos that need to be watched. There are at least 20 DVDs there. No they are not all train videos. Yes, I want to watch them, but the TV seems to be busy doing other things.
There is something different about video.
If I look at my RSS reader, I can skim the headlines of the articles and only read the ones that interest me. If I am behind, I can intellectually raise the bar on what is interesting in the spirit of getting through the content.
If I look at my podcasts, I can multi-task while listening to them. If I hear a particular portion that interests me and I was involved in something else, I can pause, rewind and listen to it again.
If I look at my magazine pile, I can treat it similarly to the RSS reader.
I can not come up with a way to efficiently process video. I can not fast forward it because I lose the audio. The audio is as important as the video usually. I can not skip over parts that don't interest me because there is no mechanism to break down a TV show by part. Also, while all of the other categories I mentioned above are done by me alone, my wife and I watch TV together.
If we are not watching TV together, someone is probably playing on the XBox 360. Unless of course we are working around the house, out, etc.
All the while, I seem to be getting farther and farther behind on my videos. Help!