Who's managing whom?

I've enjoyed learning how to manage my iPod. You might ask - "manage an iPod?" Yep, that's what it takes.

I recently obtained an iPod, and I use it for much more than making myself oblivious to the outside world. I use it a lot to keep up with the material for the class I teach at Clemson in Science, Technology and Society. Why not use the technology to teach the technology? So an intital browse through the net and the iTunes Store yielded a treasure trove of applicable podcasts. So now I keep up with the latest tech/science/environment/business/etc. news, and when an item sparks an interest, its into the web to find out more information. At its worse, I can generally count on having more and newer information available to my brain than my students. Notice I said "generally."

Now if I can do this with class-related work, why not with stuff that I'm interested in? Like the evening news broadcasts of the networks? They're available and free. So now first thing in the morning I can watch the previous evening's news.

And on Sundays, I miss most of the weekly talk shows because I'm at church. Download the video or audio podcast - no problem!

I'm also a public radio nut - when I'm in the car. They have some great programs, many of which have podcast versions, which I figure is great since I'm not in the car when many of the programs come on (oh! - the bane of a 3-mile commute to and from work).

So now, I have 35 podcasts that I'm managing. Some times there are podcasts that I want to keep, so I have to be careful not to delete them from my home computer or else they'll disappear from my iPod. At the same time, no need to junk up the iPod's memory with unneeded programs, so I have to make sure I delete those that I don't want to keep. And to keep everything current, better plug in the iPod each evening (after updating the master iTunes of course), but be careful not to plug in too early or the evening news podcasts won't be ready, and too late the nightly virus check starts up.

So now I can absorb a lot more information that I could in the recent past. Great technology the iPod, but the down side is that takes time to manage the preparation of my iPod to provide me with all this neat stuff (remembering Melvin Kranzberg: "technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral"). Every night the routine is - check that the latest is available, loaded to iTunes, iPod updated and recharged, wow! a new NATURE video, hey! Robert Reich has a new commentary, geez - I can get the entire White House news conference - not just the sound bites, who would have thunk it? - ooops - time for bed!

I'm afraid to do the math to see if I'm better off.