Infobesity - producing far more information than we can absorb.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

This is a new term for me...

Tales of Technology: Consider a cure for pernicious infobesity

When people ask me what to do about all the information bombarding us, I point out that information is not like bombs; it's like food. When man developed agriculture, nobody complained about being bombarded by food, at least until the age of vaudeville. Unless you were a confirmed hunter-gatherer, you should have welcomed the plenty that agriculture brought.

However, agriculture had it costs. Marxists claim it induced a reorganization of labor and created slavery. In "Guns, Germs, and Steel," Jared Diamond says agriculture created cities and nations that fight wars of conquest; and that the domestication of animals brought smallpox.

Reliable food production also brought a smaller, but real problem: obesity. Evolution has not yet told our hunter-gatherer bodies that the food supply is dependable. We carry months' worth of food in the form of fat. More people in our modern societies die from obesity than from starvation.

Similarly, the plenitude of information has brought about a new disease: infobesity. Newspapers, magazines, television and the Internet are producing far more information than we can absorb. Now, no one is being bombarded, i.e. forced to absorb information they don't want; but information seduces us into ingesting too much, just like food. The Internet, by getting all this information in the same place and accessible to computers, offers some the hope that we'll be able get control of the information glut. But that's an illusion.

Fundamentally, a person can absorb only so much information.

more here - http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/03089/169397.stm

discuss :popcorn:

[whathappened]

1. ya no

that is so true , i set hee everyday and all the shit that go,es thru my head from reading , i just can,t seem to rember all of it to repeat to the bone heads of this world , i,m like a bumbling idot tring to convince others to stop this fall of the union , is,nt this there point , hit us with so much the past is erased out of our minds , thanks to du we have a whole union of our own here and can get info fast

[Viva_La_Revolution]

3. Since I found DU...

My head has been exploding with information! I want to stop strangers on the street and shake them... "F*cking PAY ATTENTION!! They're stealing our country!! Our heritage!! Our Freedoms are at risk!!!"

It would probably get me arrested though, so I restrain myself. :P

[Nay]

5. Me, too, VLR. I want to rattle their teeth in their heads and scream.

My only consolation is that most of these people will REALLY be hurting in the next 10 years. Too bad they won't connect their pain to these damn Republican nazis.

[ShortnFiery]

2. Yes, along with those tasked with spin, lies and

disinformation serve to confuse the Average American into a sense of "learned helplessness."

I despise the Republican Talking points ... I know EXACTLY what they are because the right wing parrots call each morning into C-SPAN's Wasington Journal with their insane blather.

The one HOPE = There's no way that even ole' self-proclaimed geniuses like Rove can achieve victory on the TERRA WAR if this deal goes through on selling several of our ports to the UAE. Why? These ruling bastards have forgotten that they have psyched up their base to be afraid of A-RABS. There's no way in Hell that even us little ole' dumbshit chattering classes will forget the fear-mongering. This is the tipping point for BushCo, i.e., like peeing on our legs yet insisting that it's raining.

Thank God that these hate/fear mongering pundits and politicians are dosed with excessive arrogance and greed - lest they lead us into The Rapture. ;)

[Peace Patriot]

4. If you have info overload, dump it. If you hunger for info, like I do,

here it is. You can find out what's really going on in South America (an amazing socialist revolution, all over the sub-continent), and what it's based on: TRANSPARENT elections. (Transparent elections = good, leftist government, peace, justice; non-transparent elections = Bush.) You can find out just how the Bush junta stole the 2004 election here, who is counting the nation's votes, and how. And if you see a word like "Chalcedon" and wonder why a foundation would call itself that--and you want to know because the guy who funded the ES&S electronic voting machine company--one of two companies that counted all U.S. votes in 2004 (the other is Diebold)--also gave a million dollars to the "Chalcedon Foundation," you can find out what that's about (foundation that touts the death penalty for homosexuals, among other things--and took its name from the 451 A.D. Church Council at Chalcedon, where church and state were cemented together, following which Europe endured one thousand years of ignorance, poverty, serfdom, witchburnings, inquisitions, pogroms and bloody crusades.) (That's who's counting all our votes with "trade secret," proprietary programming code--guy who believes in all that.) And you can find out where the UAE is, and what kind of government and society they have (fundamentalist theocracy, where gays are imprisoned and tortured, children are used as slaves in camel races, and women are chattels--coming soon to your local harbor city).

That's our internet. And, as I said, if you can't take it, dump it out. Really. But if you're curious what's doing in this country, or somewhere else, the information is right here at your fingertips, in the most astonishing technical development since people figured out fire.

:headbang:

[Viva_La_Revolution]

6. No overload for me! Not enough hours in the day though...

so much to learn, so little time!

I heard the term on the teevee and had to look it up. I think the guy that wrote the article is a moron, maybe even a moran (the Al Gore remark) but I thought it would be interesting to just throw it out here with no comment.

:)

[benEzra]

7. Too much info is a heck of a lot better than too little...

which is why life today is a lot better, generally speaking, than life a thousand years ago. We tend to idealize peasant life, but having half your kids die in childhood, women dying in childbirth, EVERYONE in peril of mass famine if a little crop fungus comes along...subsistence farming, no medical care, and no education pretty much sucks.

There are people who still live that way in this world (sad to say), but it's not because there's too much information going around; it's generally because their governments and/or leaders don't let the peons have information, education, or meaningful self-direction.

Even if you compare life in 2006, with all the info flooding us, to life in 1950 (when info was tightly managed by information gatekeepers), we're much better with more information. We're no longer subject to information management by others, and I think infodemocracy is a fantastic thing.