Looking back through my Reader—number of unread posts, a thousand-plus—I was struck, first of all, by the categories I’d created, each representing some prior epoch of my life. Take, for example, “Web Design” (1999–2003). It was first assembled back when I was a professional Web designer (do people even call themselves “Web designers” now?), and it contains feeds for Web sites I haven’t thought about in a decade, like Signal vs. Noise, A List Apart, and Kaliber10000. (The feeds themselves were almost certainly imported from a pre-Reader app like NetNewsWire.) Looking through the folder, I can only conclude that, apparently, I used to know a lot about Web design. All that knowledge is gone now. I wonder: Will the same thing happen to the contents of the “Academia” (2003–2010) and “Dissertation” (2005–2012) folders? “Academia,” for its part, contains only one feed, for the “Call for Papers” Web site, which has hundreds and hundreds of unread posts. (Maybe if I’d participated in more symposia, I’d be an English professor now.) “Dissertation,” on the other hand, contains loads of saved JSTOR queries, as well as dozens of feeds for Web sites like Conscious Entities and The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I still read those Web sites, even though I haven’t finished my dissertation, which raises an alarming question: what will I do when, or if, I move to a new R.S.S. reader? Will I create a new “Dissertation” folder? Or have I given up hope?
Other folders are narrower and more project-based. A surprisingly extensive “Style” folder (2005–2006) chronicles my attempts to transform from a schlub into a mensch. There’s a folder for “Interior Design” (2004–2005) from around the time my wife and I moved into our first apartment. The staggeringly ironic “Productivity” folder (1999–2009) is full of feeds like 43 Folders and ZenHabits; it surely represents thousands of hours of wasted time. In another folder, “Gift Ideas” (2003–present), there are more than a dozen blogs about women’s fashion; for years, I browsed that folder in search of presents for my wife. Looking through the feeds there—EvenCleveland, Garance Doré, Sea of Shoes, Tomboy Style, Wiksten, That Kind of Woman—I can’t help but marvel at how people’s lives have changed. Garance got together with The Sartorialist! Wiksten moved from Brooklyn to Iowa! Women’s style blogs, it turns out, are better than men’s because they’re full of personal details; men’s blogs are just photos of cars and pocket squares.
All of those feeds, meanwhile, are reminders of a more relaxed time—a time when Google Reader was, basically, for fun. That changed in 2010, when I took over a column called “Brainiac” in the Boston Globe’s Ideas section. As the Brainiac, I was responsible for writing a blog about new ideas. At the end of the week, three of the ideas would appear in a beautifully illustrated spread in the Sunday paper. Anything could be an idea: a new sculpture, a new building, a blog post, a just-written academic tome. Inside my Google Reader, this was the Cambrian explosion, Modernism, the Renaissance. All of a sudden there were lots of surprising new folders: “Architecture” (The Architect’s Newspaper), “Art” (ArtsJournal), “Economics” (Interfluidity), “Linguistics” (Language Log), and so on. (There are lots more, but I can’t give away all of my R.S.S. feeds.)
Just as a soldier lives for battle, just as a wolf lives for the hunt, so my Google Reader, I felt, was leading the life I was meant to lead. A few months in, after I’d carefully curated my feeds, my Reader really did seem to contain the entirety of the world of ideas. A few hours with Reader, and I could “read” The New Republic and The Wilson Quarterly, City Journal and Pruned, ftrain and XKCD, Bibliokept and Grasping Reality with Both Hands, The American Prospect and Idle Words. I lived, and read, in a state of information-saturated bliss. (It lasted until I discovered an even better version of Google Reader: publicists at publishing companies, who, if you are a book reviewer, will send you review copies. As I transitioned to a mostly book-based diet, Reader fell by the wayside.)
In announcing the closure of Reader, Google said that usage has been declining, and I can see why. Reader was made for absurdly ambitious readers. It’s designed for people like me—or, rather, for people like the person I used to be—that is, for people who really do intend to read everything. You might feel great when you reach Inbox Zero, but, believe me, it feels even better to reach Reader Zero: to scroll and scan until you’ve seen it all. Twitter, which has replaced Reader (and R.S.S.) for many people, works on a different principle. It’s not organized or completist. There are no illusions with Twitter. You can’t pretend, by “marking it read,” that you’ve read it all; you don’t think you’re going to cram “the world of ideas” into your Twitter stream. At the same time, you’re going to be surprised, provoked, informed. It’s a better model.
But Reader had a lot going for it, too. Using Twitter feels, to me, like joining a club; Reader felt like filling up a bookcase. It was a place for organizing your knowledge, and also for stating, and reviewing, your intentions and commitments. It kept a record of the things you meant to read but never did; of the writers you loved but don’t anymore. I won’t miss Reader when it shuts down, on July 1st. But I will miss the old me—the person I described in Google Reader, without knowing it.
Illustration by Arnold Roth.