It started dawning on me that the things I read in any given day (on news sites, in magazines, newspapers, blogs, internet forums, etc) are all mostly useless. That is, after reading them I am in almost no way better than if I had not read them. And yet, I still go through the daily rituals of reading my usual set of information sources.
It seems like many others are reaching similar conclusions.
The way I look at it, this phenomenon is very similar to what happened to humans when food became abundant. In nature, food is scarce, and so we evolved over millions of years to eat as much as we can when we come across food. The problem is that, now that food is abundant and easily accessible, those same impulses have been subverted and are causing us to overeat and become obese.
This is exactly what is happening to information: An age-old desire to learn as much about the world as possible, which was healthy when information was scarce, is causing us to over-consume information now that it is abundant and easily accessible.
In the old days, books were rare and expensive, and only a few could read and learn about the world. And for those who did read, there was no heavy influx of books, likely due to the fact that few people had the luxury of becoming authors. Then, books became cheaper and more people could read them, and more people could afford to become professional authors. The result was a big increase in the amount of information that people had access to. However, with the exception of newspapers, there were not that many sources of daily-updated information, and so the influx of information was manageable.
When the internet came along, connecting us to the sum total of human knowledge and information, the floodgates opened. It meant that not only did people have access to a lot of information, but they now had access to continually-updated information. The number of sites you can go to to satisfy your thirst for news (whether hard news, entertainment news, tech news, sports, etc) is now so large that no one can catch up with all the information. This may have been the first time in history that this happened, since in the past it was at least conceivable to read all the newspapers and magazines you had access to in your city.
The true deluge started with smartphones. Before smartphones, at least you had to be in certain locations (your house, your office) to access all the information out there. With smartphones you can access all the information 24/7 no matter where you happen to be. In addition, they are able to satisfy not only our desire for information, but also our desire for keeping in touch with friends and loved ones, and a more recent need to stay in touch with work issues.
As a result, you see people constantly checking their smartphones for news, discussions, texts from friends, twitter updates, emails from work, etc. Our desire for information has been subverted by the 24/7 ubiquitous access to more information than we can ever keep up with, to the point where a lot of people are constantly looking into and pecking at their phones like lab rats pressing a lever for food pellets.
Not all people are affected equally by this, of course. But for some, to the degree that the over-consumption of information is causing them to be unproductive, not-present-in-the-moment with friends, stressed, unfulfilled by the endless search for new news, etc, this is, essentially, information obesity.
Of course, it’s ironic that, by writing this post, I’m contributing to information obesity.
Originally published at https://andrewoneverything.com. Original responses:
- Will responded: AGREE!
The internet is a wonderful tool, a free library to find any information you can imagine. But it’s easy to waste hours looking at nothing at all. Whoever can figure out how to catalog and index the BEST information out there will be a genius! - Steven responded: Exactly what I’ve been thinking about. Taking your thoughts further, our body can only process so much food in a healthy way before you start to feel sick and thus you select carefully the food you eat. With information, I believe that with the increases in information, especially information that does not serve to improve yourself in some way but rather simply information consumption for consumptions sake, our minds will have less time to actually process the good information that enriches our thinking and knowledge. More time will be spent consuming and less digesting and even less digesting good information.
