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: