Christmas is here and it is a great time to exchange gifts and spend time with friends and family.
Christmas is also a time that is synonymous with overconsumption and overeating. It seems that every month, I read some alarming statistic about North Americans’ growing girth. A significant portion of us are now classified as obese.
Now there’s the term infobesity—the tendency to gorge oneself on information. British journalist John Naish used the term in his book Enough: Breaking free from the world of more. Here’s an excerpt from the book:
“It involves fighting—and here’s my own new word—infobesity, by restricting one’s data diet. There are compelling reasons. The glut of information is not only causing stress and confusion; it also makes us do irrational things such as ignore crucial health information. The British Government’s latest survey on our food-buying patterns shows that while we are given more information than ever about healthy eating, our consumption of fresh food has fallen…We are so wired to gather information that often we no longer do anything useful with it. Instead of pausing to sift our intake for relevance and quality, the daily diet of prurient, profound, confusing and conflicting information gets chucked on to a mental ash-heap of things vaguely comprehended. Then we rush to try to make sense of it all…by getting more.”
Many of us are overexposed to information. With social media proliferating and smart phone adoption skyrocketing, it’s now easier than ever to read blog posts on the go, see what your virtual friends are doing, and check out the latest videos on YouTube.
As professional communicators, I think we should all be mindful of not contributing to the deluge of information. For a related post, see Why Writing Less Can Offer More.
I have worked as a
Very important subject. Becomes more and more important to write taking this in account, also more difficult. Just comes to mind: 20 years ago I was somehow excited to send out press releases about the results of studies (I was working with a number of research universities). Today I couldn’t even think of writing a single study report. News media has stuffed our eyes and ears full of ‘studies’. Who even reads study reports anymore? Or, worse yet, who takes them seriously for what they are trying to say?
Nice article, and I tend to agree. This is especially so when bits of information we’re overwhelmed with seem to conflict with each other, creating confusion. This confusion can either lead to buying paralysis or over-buying while trying to satisfy so many recommendations.
Good article, Robert. I love the term “infobesity” — thank you for introducing it to me!
It might be interesting to remember JoAnn Hackos’ motto:
“New users aren’t interested in concepts. They want to jump in and try the product” (Seminar on minimalism)
One topic discussed during the Vienna minimalist class (November 2010) was: what about providing the user with a manual made of a TROUBLESHOOTING chapter only?
Comments are more than welcome 😉
What we’re really looking for is not an “information society” — for just the reasons outlined. In fact, it’s a “transformation society.” The information that counts — the ONLY information that counts — is information that helps us transform ourselves, helps us transform information into know-how or awareness, helps us realise ourselves.
The rest is info-junk-food (my neologism, but maybe not only mine, as it’s kind of obvious).
Yes, and organizations can get wrapped up in traditional documentation practices that they don’t have time to create really useful documents. For example, they might focus on large, exhaustive “theory of operations” sections in user guides, which means there’s no time to write a quick Getting Started guide.
Do users read the entire User Guide when installing a new product? Or do they jump right in? If the choices are a large, overwhelming tell-all user guide or just jumping in without reading more than the release notes, a busy, overloaded user is probably going to choose the latter, thinking, “I’ll get to the manual later.”
One of the comments on the article referred to “layers” of information, and I agree with that approach. It takes skill, planning, and filtering, but it’s something to strive for.