Feeling the current, or being swept away?

A good in-depth article on information hoarding:

Linder argues that as we become squeezed for consumption time, we’ll consume more expensive things over cheaper things when possible to make use of more goods on a total-cost basis. But when the cost of goods is zero, what happens then? As behavioral economists (most vociferously, Dan Ariely) have pointed out, we find the promise of free things hard to resist (even when a little thinking reveals that the free-ness is illusory). So when with very little effort we can accumulate massive amounts of “free” stuff from various places on the internet, we can easily end up with 46 days (and counting) worth of unplayed music on a hard drive. We end up with a permanent 1,000+ unread posts in our RSS reader, and a lingering, unshakable feeling that we’ll never catch up, never be truly informed, never feel comfortable with what we’ve managed to take in, which is always in the process of being undermined by the free information feeds we’ve set up for ourselves. We end up haunted by the potential of the free stuff we accumulate, and our enjoyment of any of it becomes severely impinged.

Linder being the author of The Harried Leisure Class, apparently. A book I haven't read and probably won't.

There's also this rather insightful essay by Nicholas Carr. Which I did read through to the end, finding myself agreeing with him, at least on the effects of too much information on my own person. (Whether Google's 20% time is engineered purposefully for evil is another question. I hear from many "Googlers" that it's 20% after your requisite 80-hour week, and David Hansson recently pointed out that it's supposed to be 20% more time doing the exact same things only with a different name, and that getting away from the computer sometimes might be a good idea.)

There is this counterpoint, if you can call it that, by John Batelle but I found it a little too "rah rah INFORMATION AGE!" for my liking.