What, Me Overstimulated?
My latest cause celebre is "Information Fatigue." From here:
See also this, which I haven't checked out too much yet, but hope to, once I overcome this paralysis of the analytical capacity from which I suffer.
Actually, though, I'm serious, I think this is a real thing. Making it sound like a 'disease' might be foolish, but do minds get plum-tuckered from too much stuff? My intuition (which is never wrong, you know) says yes.
Too many new faces is wearying too (and stimulating), as I appreciate after a Sunday afternoon spent at the McCarren Park Pool Party. You know what's funny? Information, be it the kind you gather from surfing the internet, or the kind you get from checking out thousands of hipsters in the course of a couple hours in the sweet summer sun, may act kind of like a drug. It's really exciting and great at first, and it makes you feel goofy and euphoric and even a little manic. And you just want more. Later, you end up feeling kind of dizzy and sick. I wonder if they work at all similarly, in the brain.
Information fatigue, crowd fatigue, maybe even...New York fatigue. Which segues me nicely into the continuation of 'Hated Despite of Great Qualities,' which I'm working on, and hope to get up later this week.
(At McCarren Park Pool on a Sunday, from some Flickr set.)
INFORMATION FATIGUE SYNDROME:
Perhaps you shouldn’t be reading this. The term was coined in a recent report from Reuters News Agency, called Dying for Information?, which argued that many people are becoming highly stressed through trying to cope with the huge amounts of information flooding them from books, fax messages, the telephone, journals, and the Internet. The symptoms of Information Fatigue Syndrome include “paralysis of analytical capacity”, “a hyper-aroused psychological condition”, and “anxiety and self-doubt”, leading to “foolish decisions and flawed conclusions”. It is a problem which the report argues particularly affects the group called knowledge workers whose jobs mainly involve dealing with and processing information. The term is obviously based on the name of the medical condition chronic fatigue syndrome and is abbreviated to IFS. Though it is a phrase that sounds as if it ought to catch on, sightings have been rare except in news items about the report itself, so this one may never make it into the dictionaries.
See also this, which I haven't checked out too much yet, but hope to, once I overcome this paralysis of the analytical capacity from which I suffer.
Actually, though, I'm serious, I think this is a real thing. Making it sound like a 'disease' might be foolish, but do minds get plum-tuckered from too much stuff? My intuition (which is never wrong, you know) says yes.
Too many new faces is wearying too (and stimulating), as I appreciate after a Sunday afternoon spent at the McCarren Park Pool Party. You know what's funny? Information, be it the kind you gather from surfing the internet, or the kind you get from checking out thousands of hipsters in the course of a couple hours in the sweet summer sun, may act kind of like a drug. It's really exciting and great at first, and it makes you feel goofy and euphoric and even a little manic. And you just want more. Later, you end up feeling kind of dizzy and sick. I wonder if they work at all similarly, in the brain.
Information fatigue, crowd fatigue, maybe even...New York fatigue. Which segues me nicely into the continuation of 'Hated Despite of Great Qualities,' which I'm working on, and hope to get up later this week.
(At McCarren Park Pool on a Sunday, from some Flickr set.)
posted by katherine | 11:56 PM
2 Comments:
it's sort of like with dogs and the sticking their heads out windows of cars trick. i mean, supposedly they do it because of the insane rush of smells coming at their super finely honed noses on the wind produces some kind of drug-style happy...makes as much sense as any other explanation for the behavior. and we flock to overwhelming sensation, too, all kinds of it. but overindulgence *always* hurts, right? being too full, or hungover, or sore from physical exertion, or sunburnt, or when you sleep too long and feel ick.
so, how to moderate? seems like the internet/multimedia overload and crowds require different approaches, but maybe not. maybe it's about a change in perspective (like, how bad is it really? is the suffering worth the experience/gained insight?), coupled w/ an understanding of what specifically leaves you feeling gross after an episode of hardcore info intake (is it the info? is it your eyes? the chair your sitting in? the way you were hunched over your desk? is it the number of things you read? the content? was it the kind of people who surrounded you? the other stimuli at the time?)
it's mostly about the sensation of time slipping away... time not spent creating something, not going forward meaningfully but definitely going forward. scarier now that we're older and ever-conscious of the expiration date on our time allottments. i dunno, dude. it's a thing, for sure. keeping writing about it.
The only information you really need is this: I am in Ithaca and await your presence. xoxo, Corinna
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