Information Overload

I read the greatest quote in my ALWD journal yesterday, about how lawyers and law students tend to feed their brain with various bits and pieces of information (much of it admittedly entertaining dreck, as least for me most of it is entertaining dreck - some of it actually is useful in the real world, but it is mostly entertaining dreck) looking for connections and patterns that will help them formulate legal arguments and connections between two completely different but semi-related things. (JAWLD, Autumn 2009 - sorry, don't remember the author, but when I get a chance to look it up, I will add a citation to the end of this post.)

Then this morning I logged into my Google Reader and discovered that they had added this great tool in my side bar - two actually. One was Recommendations - Google suggests blogs that have similar content to what you already read (it was not surprizing to find that some of the suggested blogs were blogs that I were already on my list to check out because their authors regularly cross-posted in the blogs that I read.) The other was "Most Popular" which is not a list of the most popular blogs but a list of the most popular posts which keeps updating so that there is no end. It was only after I had spent the entirety of my break time and looked to see where the end was that I realized that there was no end. It just kept updating. The more posts you read, the more it updated.

Which really worries me. If there is that much dreck out there (and there really is, I purposely skipped quite a bit of it because the titles warned me that the content might not be work-friendly) has the giant 'group conversation' just become a bunch of people talking to themselves? A lot of "sound and fury signifying nothing" (can't remember the author). Has meaningful conversation just left the building?

This is especially worrying because according to another article I read, lawyers are the chattiest bunch of all. (I have a reading problem, if you haven't been able to determine that from this current post. Unfortunately there are no 12 step groups for reading. In fact, if you are a non-reader you are put on programs to help you become a reader if you are in elementary school. I'm not going to look at this too closely for too long. Part of the reason I went to law school so was that I could be PAID to READ and WRITE ALL DAY! As my husband has observed - there is obviously something very sick and wrong with me.) Anyway, we go on even when we know we are over-talking. And yet we do it anyway. The best evidence of this is my LAW assignment that will not die. I have a page length limit. I have been over that limit for days. Every night I have a date with "the red pen of doom." Yesterday I cut two pages out of the draft and put one back in. Yikes! I still have 1.5 pages I need to cut, which means that I will need to cut at least 3 before I will get it right because I know that I will be putting at least 1 back and possibly 2. With that math, I'm doomed to turn this assignment in at least 1/2 page over the limit (which will not be good for my grade, and that will not be good for my morale.)

Anyway, this glut of information is like standing in a giant open-air square listening to everyone talk on their cell phones. Some of it is meaningful. Some of it is clearly important because people are saying "wait while I add that" and then stop talking long enough to add whatever it is to their iPhones or Blackberries, but most of it is just noise. I've quit talking on my cell phone and gone to texting because that way I'm not contributing to the cloud of noise that seems to be everywhere.

However, the good thing about all this noise, dreck, and endless stream of information was the really cool comparison I was able to draw between the problem I needed to write about and a completely unrelated non-law activity that happened to provide just the illustration I needed, and allowed me to cut almost two pages out of my LAW assignment. So I have now been on the lookout for another brilliant non-law example that I can use to cut another two pages out of my assignment and hopefully get it completed. Which is why I have spent a large amount of time reading frivolous dreck in Google Reader over the past several days. You never know where another great idea might come from.

So if anyone is interested, I am doing my own part to contribute to the overload and return the favor by posting this to my blog. If you are looking for me, you can find me at the SBA table at the FLYSX review weekend with a copy of my LAW assignment and my red pen.

jm

Where are all the working women?

I normally don't write on this blog about things that I read in other blogs. (Although that is changing.) I reserve this blog for things that I encounter being both a mommy and a law student - things that are funny, things that make me think, things that I think are important that someone else might want to read about. But I don't tend to comment about things I read in other people's blogs.

I read other blogs because it is a way for me to find out the perspectives of other people without having to meet them in person. And if it turns out that I'm not sure that I agree with what they write or I don't have an interest in what they're currently blogging about, I can click the "mark as read" button and I don't have to come up with any funky excuse about why I didn't answer their email or return their phone call, and I don't have to try and think up any more small talk while I wait for someone to come rescue me like I do if I'm in a social setting.

But this post on Modite caught my attention. First of all, it specifically addresses working women in the midwest. But as I read the post, I felt that it could equally apply to women in the Northeast, or the Pacific Northwest, or small rural or suburban communities on the West Coast. In short, there is a shortage of women blogging about their experiences being working women. Second she specifically asks for experiences of women who live in Wisconsin. And as I read that my law school brain lit up and said "Wisconsin! Joy Nonweiler is from Wisconsin. And she was the first women from an online law school to take and pass the Wisconsin bar. And this is a second career for her, and...and...and" which caused me to look back at the plea for more working women to write about what it is like to be a working woman, and think about the question again.

Because I am a working woman. And I go to school full time - in the same online law program that Joy graduated from. And if you kept track of what I post to Twitter and FB in my status area you would assume (rightly!) that I pretty much eat, sleep, take care of my kids, and go to law school. And there are other times that you would assume (not as rightly - but understandably) that somewhere along the line my kids and sleep disappeared from my life and I took up residence in the law library. A close college friend of mine who lives 10 minutes away from me told me "I would call you and try to get together with you more often, but most of them time I get the impression that you are buried in a law textbook and using a snorkel to breathe." This was not in any way a slam or a complaint - our friendship went through a similar hiatus when she was in medical school - but just a frank honest impression of just how busy I was.

Which brings me back to the issue of the working woman who blogs - we don't. Even though I keep a blog, the amount I post does not rate the title of blogging. Unless it is written in our job description to blog or we happen to be someone who blogs rather than journals, or we happen to be very techy and like blogging, very few of us blog because we view our time as a precious commodity and are careful what we do with it. What little time we have we spend taking care of the other areas of our life that are outside of our work day. We take care of kids or parents or sometimes both. We call friends who live close by or far away and plan time to see them (when we aren't breathing through a snorkel because we have an essay due for Con Law and the proper flow for an essay on the commerce clause is eluding us). We feel guilty because we aren't "doing enough" to advance the goals and interests of women in society. We feel guilty because we aren't "spending enough time" taking care of the needs of our children and families. We feel guilty taking 10 minutes and spending it on "self-care" even when our therapist or PC physician has told us that we need it.

We don't blog because it isn't a priority. Clearly there is a need for it - my blog list features more mommy blogs than working women blogs, and the working women blogs I subscribe to are often women without kids who blog as part of their job, not because they are part of the community. So in answer to the question - where are all the working women? Hopefully they are out from behind their computers doing something for themselves or their kids.