Learn to stop worrying and love the interweb
TMI (too much information) or cognitive overload is a problem with which many people struggle. Rather than the relative scarcity of information symbolised by the 1970s World Book Encyclopedias at my parents’, bought to ameliorate their children’s rural isolation, there is now a glowing, throbbing, multiply expanding glut of information freely available to all.
It is a river, a mighty virtual Amazon (not the bookstore), of continual updates. A twitter feed is a way of diverting part of the stream. Watching the posts is watching the flow, (winnie-the-)pooh sticks of ideas floating at intervals. It’s fitting that Yahoo’s service for mashing and filtering RSS feeds amongst other things, is called Pipes. We become virtual plumbers, selecting and diverting the information stream, adjusting the pressure.
And there is a pressure to keep up with it. If your professional development relies directly on ‘knowing’ things, then the pressure is constant.
Learning to relax comes from a number of sources. Learning is about the connections we make, both socially and cognitively. Learning how to recognise who to trust or at least who to follow, where the best information is and how it fits into our thinking, is a skill worth developing and something that happens over time. The idea of distributed cognition recognises that external tools and information storage are an extension of our ability to reason and learn.
From Alan Levine on Cogdogblog about the myth of too much information:
“It’s not that we have Too Much Information, its that we have Too Little Skill in managing it differently and we get mired down in our inability to accept that we cannot contain it all. I’m proud of saying I don’t know much but I know how to get to know what I don’t know. We don’t have to keep the information inside of us, we have to be versed in the flow of it, and of letting a lot of it flow by and not worrying that we are losing because we are not filling up our buckets with information. And knowing when we don’t have to have our lips on the hose.”
Change and unfamiliarity engender fear. Constant change can be a bit of a problem, then. One of my worries about support for learning technology is how to counteract the fear that is brought to the online world. Fear of embarrassment, fear of exposure, fear of breaking something, fear that you don’t have anything useful to say. And that’s just me. Except for fear of breaking something - I’m pretty happy to jump on in. 
It is a real fear, though, that people have to get through to start experimenting - because you truly don’t know what the possibilities are till you’ve tried something - and enjoying the opportunities.
I like the ‘a journey starts with one step’ philosophy. If you can get a little further along the path, all the little steps will add up and before you know it you’re there. (On this theme, I’m following http://www.wheelylongway.com/ who are doing their journey incrementally from Portugal to China on bicycle.)
It’s a bit of a truism to say focus on your passion. It is both easy and difficult to follow this piece of advice. For people who are naturally polymath, and everything is interesting, finding the focus can be difficult - and you can feel a bit like a pooh stick helplessly spiralling in the eddies of the information river. I’m finding some focus in the learning sciences: how people learn - an fundamentally social exercise, and truly well served by social networking and online collaborative tools. Though the amount of publishing around education and technology is breathtaking. Narrowing the focus and finding true passion is an ongoing project.
Someone viewing what you post is helpful. Speaking to the void is a hard thing to sustain. Though if it is a way of reflecting, as this post undoubtedly is, there is the value of thinking through and writing to get clarity and make an external record - expanding a personal distributed cognition. But a conversation and social connection is important. Witness the joy of being retweeted or seeing clicks on a recommended link. Feedback and acknowledgement, as well as receiving different perspectives, are nutrients to sustain participation.
Rather than being buffeted by the flood, we can manufacture our own serendipity - water the barren fields, drink to sustain life - and have some fun too.