Today’s Binary Response is in response to this article by Baldur Bjarnason earlier this month about foggy brain and RSS feeds.
Baldur begins his piece by reflecting on his experience with brain fog during the COVID-19 pandemic before shifting focus to the core of his article: the use and relevance of RSS feeds. When he transitions to discussing RSS feeds, he writes: For those of you who aren’t familiar with feed readers: it’s a set of web standards dating back to the nineties that provide a mechanism for letting a piece of software follow updates to a website as they happen. Not quite in real-time, but close enough for most purposes.
It’s important to consider the broader media context when talking about RSS. Around 2005, with the release of Apple’s iPod and the rise of Facebook, social media algorithms began to influence how people consumed information. This period also saw a surge in popularity for email newsletters, which became a convenient way for users to receive updates. While Avishek Mondal claimed in a Linkedin post that Google Trends shows email newsletter subscriptions began to decline in October 2024, many other sources suggest that social media usage is decreasing—and email newsletters are experiencing a resurgence.
Adding to this complexity, some users may not even know how to find the RSS feeds for their favorite sites, and in some cases, major websites don’t offer RSS feeds at all.
He later states: Almost every blog and newsletter platform out there supports feeds (usually RSS), so you generally never have to subscribe to a newsletter manually over email, unless you’re in the business of intentional self-sabotage and are out to deliberately destroy your own email productivity.
Just because a platform offers RSS functionality doesn’t mean every user will take advantage of it. Many content creators and platforms do not actively promote RSS as a feature. Plus, when users sign up for newsletters, especially from sources they trust or pay for, they often don’t feel like their inboxes are being cluttered. If someone is paying for access, receiving content via email reinforces the value of that content—and suggests that email newsletters are far from becoming obsolete.
Later in the article, Baldur circles back to the topic of brain fog, offering multiple hypotheses he feels have been misrepresented online due to people experiencing it. These topics range from car safety to legal regulations to the U.S. economy. His argument is that these public opinion pieces should be viewed through a lens of fogginess brought on by a mixing up of adjacent concepts.
Here’s the thing, folks: People may sometimes share opinions that sound misinformed or naïve, but often, they’re just trying to spark conversation. That conversation might come out as a tangled mess of thoughts—what Baldur might call “mixing up adjacent concepts”—but it’s still a meaningful attempt to engage.
With that… Brain fog is likely real and, in many cases, tied to health conditions. But it’s also important to recognize how information overload—whether through RSS feeds, email newsletters, or endless social media scrolling—contributes to this sense of fogginess. People often refer to things they’ve forgotten or feel confused about as “brain fog” and in today’s hyper-connected world, that confusion may be more about the quantity of information than its source.