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The fine art of online multi-slacking

Posted on March 22, 2009 by

Multislacking

Back in the day when I used to have cable TV, I would end every work day with some zone-out time channel surfing for an hour of two before bed. I would steer toward the crime procedurals, 80s action movies, billiards tournaments — anything that involved no intellectual thought whatsoever.  I would often regret it the next day, vowing to read a book or listen to music or clear out my personal in-box.  But inevitably I would find myself in front of the TV again well past midnight watching a "CSI Miami" marathon.

Now that I don't have cable television, I hardly miss it at all. The few shows I want to watch can usually be found online.  And I get the smug satisfaction of telling other people in the midst of conversations, "Oh I haven't watched [some television show].  You see, I don't watch television anymore."

That said, the desire to zone out still persists. And I've found that I have smoothly replaced my TV veg-out time with online veg-out time. Call it "Multi-slacking."

I have my laptop carefully set up to pull in all of my favorite no-brainer online content:

  • RSS feeds from dozens of nerdy blogs (Wil Wheaton, Gizmodo, Massively, etc.)
  • YouTube subscriptions to various silly video feeds (lil Shaolin, Torley, Hypno, etc.)
  • Silly Podcasts like "The Onion" and "Diggnation"
  • Tweetdeck to fill my monitor with Twitter updates I'm following
  • Facebook to surf through the reports of my "friends" banal lives
  • Aimless teleporting around in Second Life…
  • … and the list goes on. 

I still find myself wiling away the late night hours doing frivolous surfing, except this time its with a trackpad and a 15-inch monitor instead of a remote control and a 24-inch television. 

The more things change…

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