Each day they come. Updates. Posts. Updates. The categories fill: Beer, Boy Oh Boy, City, Comics, Dylan, Food, Music, Media, Missouri, Sports, T-Shirts, Tech, and so on. Category after category. Update after update. A river of information. I try to organize this information into each category, but the organization does little to contain the information pouring out of the reader. RSS is the instant flow of information McLuhan proclaimed. It is the nervous system of a chain of networked bodies.

Some feeds, you have no choice but to hit “Mark all as read” immediately. Neatorama. Mashable! Expecting Rain. Slam ONLINE. Who can keep up with this reading? Other feeds, the posts come slow or have dried up completely. The reading is easy. Thank you for not writing. Or write soon? Which is it I want?

Reading is dead? Only if you skip the updates. Otherwise, we are a culture of reading. Endless reading. Endless streams of ideas, commentary, thoughts, nervousness, hostility, sales about to happen, dissapointments in teams, bloggers vetting and doing research.  When we call this media a “feed” we mean that it never satisfies our hunger. If three tabbed windows always stay open on my browser they are: Gmail (for those pop up chats when someone sees I am online and for beer news updates - even email is a feed), Webmail (when at work) and the Google Reader. Feed me, the plant in Little Shop of Horrors yelled. Feed me! We’re hungry and our bellies are full.