Yesterday, I was responding to an e-mail from a friend I lost touch with many decades ago - she had written for guidance with respect to a couple of attorneys to whom she had been referred for a civil matter in San Diego, although she now lives out of state. In the process of catching up, I was telling her my typical Sunday a.m. was to watch hours of the morning news shows, and trying to devour the NY Times Sunday edition.
Her response was that she didn't watch the shows because they gave her too much depressing information. There really is almost too much information available to us because of the explosion of media, including the Internet, and we must question whether we really need or even want it all.
I have an office in Rancho Santa Fe, practice family law [including divorce], and serve on a public advisory body for planning and zoning centered around that community. So, I have a daily Google search to send me any information relating to RSF and Divorce, in particular. Google allows us to set up such searches to run at regular intervals [even hourly], so we don't miss anything. I suppose if I were a quilter in Carlsbad, I could find out any news stories or blogs relating to "Carlsbad and quilts" so that I might learn of a new quilting store or gallery in the neighborhood.
It's amazing how many stories hit each day with my search. The cryptic blurb I get from Google is to entice me to link to the underlying story. What I normally receive is...
something along the line of "she visited a friend who lived in Rancho Santa Fe....and she began a career in [something like writing book, becoming a life coach, etc.] after her divorce...."
Occasionally, or rather "rarely", the story has some relevance to my life, but generally not relevant to the reason for the search. Maybe I find that some person I know [either personally or through reputation] is getting a divorce - sometimes it's merely the synergy from reading a story to which I might not otherwise pay attention, and I learn something new. It is unusual that the story is more than just more noise in my life.
It's amazing how many people write blog pieces that have the name of the town and "divorce" in them: Maybe a friend lives there, and someone else got a divorce, and somehow the word and phrase get linked together by Google's magic bots. I suppose if I searched "Landers, Wyoming, and Banker" I would have a similar problem: Little about Banks and Landers.
Are we really gaining anything by access to so much information, and at such regular intervals?
Among other things, I subscribe to a service that provides me a summary of every appellate decision in California relating to family law, so I can keep up with current developments - every Monday, I get an e-mail digest of the prior week's cases - the blurb is sometimes unintelligible, occasionally intriguing, and always somewhat relevant, so I then link to the original, complete decision.
At least the service that aggregates the summaries has sifted out those that aren't relevant to the practice of law. If I found them relevant to the public, disturbing, or interesting, you'd read about it in this blog - unfortunately, not much appears here on developments in California law as a result. I just don't find most of the cases of general interest, or something I care to write about.
Maybe it's time to re-evaluate how much information we allow ourselves to take it and try to assimilate, and the intervals. I attended a time management seminar years ago, where the presenter recommended we set our e-mail programs to only check for mail 2 or 3 times per day - otherwise it was too distracting, and conditioned our clients to believe they can interrupt whatever we are doing and receive an immediate response. I think he had something.
Fortunately, I haven't yet fallen victim to Twitter and the like.
