I picked up on a new podcast through Inoreader, my RSS feed, this morning.  It originates from the Sante Fe Institute and is called Complexity.  It occurred to me that the podcast, show notes, and other adjacencies had some secret demands it was making on my time. This post explores my quick and dirty analysis.

I did a quick scrape of the podcast page using LinkGrabber. I copied and pasted that into an etherpad.
From there I began to explore every link and to attach an approximate time to read/listen/explore each link. Here is an embed of the etherpad:

If you scroll to the bottom of the pad above, you will find a estimate of the time needed to ‘interact” that is staggering: 146 minutes to listen/read/explore the initial set of links but without the last ten or so items that are related articles and resources included by the editors. I estimate that there is another eight hours of close reading of journal articles there.  The total?  656 minutes.

And what about sharing?  That is where the time spent can really skyrocket depending upon the uses I would make of the links.  These deep and often abiding adjacencies are often never considered by their authors.  We have to figure out how to help readers decide what is worth gathering into the fold, making sense of with annotation and online tools like Notion/Napkin/Obsidian/ or offline tools like notecards and indices.  Otherwise we will just get a lot of bad reading, shoddy analysis, and shared work that is not worth our time.

I will think on this a bit and I hope you might join me in the periphery using Hypothes.is.