Information Obesity

The outcome of information overconsumption is information obesity. The obesity is from the ignorance of not know the poor information one is consuming. There are many physiological and psychological symptoms that follow information obesity.

One symptom is a poor sense of time. When people read their emails, look at a text, or surf the web, they get a hit of dopamine. The dopamine distorts someone’s sense of time. What feels like minutes can actually be hours consuming information.

Another symptom is apnea. Linda Stone coined the term email apnea, which also applies to other information sources besides email. Stone discovered that when dealing with different types of incoming information her breath and heart rate would become irregular. She saw that when she received a text message, her heart rate would increase, and would not go down until she read the message or after about five minutes when she could return to what she was doing and forget about the message.

                                  

A third symptom of information obesity is attention fatigue. Attention is a trait in a person that must be built up overtime. Johnson states that “you don’t train for a marathon by sitting on a couch, and you don’t help your attention span by giving into the temptation of every distraction that comes across your eyeballs” (Johnson, 68). This symptom directly relates to attention deficit trait, a term mentioned in Craig Watkins’ article “May I have your attention?’ The Consequences of Anytime Anywhere Technology”. Attention deficit trait (also known as ADT) is a “condition induced by modern life, in which you’ve become so busy attending to so many inputs and outputs that you become increasingly distracted, irritable, impulsive, restless, and, over the long term, underachieving” (Watkins, 186). People’s attention diminishes when they over-consume information with a poor information diet.

 Other symptoms of information obesity include loss of social breadth, a distorted sense of reality, and brand loyalty.
          I believe that much of our society suffers from information obesity. Today's youth is growing up with an iPad in their hands instead of Legos, Barbies, and Rock'em Sock'em Roots. The consumption of mass amounts of bad information is nonstop.I myself spend ridiculous amounts of time on Facebook,watching television, and putting bad information in my brain. The Information Diet made me realize my information obesity and my need for an information diet.