Whenever you go to a typical American Supermarket, you deal with 40,000 choices for purchasing 18 items. According to Kevin Kelly, on an average you complete Shopping in 20 minutes.
On one hand, it is an incredible feat. But, on the other, not so much. Constraints lead to simpler decision-making.
Your Physical capacity to bring back the goods and Money acts as hard constraints. ...and the social rituals of having different categories of meals, such as breakfast, lunch,etc., constraints the type of food that you would need and acts as one of the many soft constraints. All these constraints bring a beautiful structure, in reducing this magical feat into a pedestrian ritual.
Constraint is not neccessarily bad. The biggest constraint of all,Gravity, makes life possible.
It is not the same case when we consume digital goods from the internet. We live in the Age of Free. Our cognition though limited, is stretched due to the mojo of the internet.
There are millions of pages to chose from. The only artificial constraint that you have today is the Search Term.
Facebook and our Friends in real life, shepherd us in some artificial direction. Yet, the magical mojo of the Internet, make us go astray, like Mary's little Lamb. We tend to spend more time, shopping for digital content, than actually consuming.
Wish somebody figures out how to harness this connected intelligence into a beautiful order, using Technology and to make consumption in the internet more joyful... that we spend more time consuming and help us break away from this perpetual search mindset.
Brings to mind the distinction between 'liking' and 'wanting' in the brain (opiates and dopamine)...seems we are more driven by the wanting system and we more like to search for content, than to consume it. No surprises there!
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