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This word is a neologism that describes the situation of having too much information to manage. Many smartphone users suffer from this disease, which has appeared with various inventions in our "modern" world. But it's not just a matter of the device, it's a matter of human behaviour. I can give a testimony like many people in the world.
I remember the first time there was continuous news on the radio in France. It was France Info, a new avatar of Radio France with a journal every fifteen minutes. But I heard of this phenomenon with CNN, a television news network created in 1980. No one in France had heard of it before the first Gulf War in 1990. CNN's pictures were everywhere and many people would have signed up to have an equivalent. In France, we had France Info since 1987. And before that, we had to wait... We could listen to a journal every hour on the radio or the famous news journal on television at 8pm. And the newspaper the next day for more news. It was enough to know what was happening in the world. For the most curious, we had a news magazine like "Courrier International" with translated articles from the international press. I was happy with that, but the more we have, the more we want. I remember 2001, September 11th. I heard it on the radio in my car. When I got home, I was transfixed by the images on the television. And I had just subscribed to Time magazine. What a bad idea, because for a year the theme was the same, with the "war on terror" and so on... It could have been a sign that the media could go on and on about a subject without any new information about it. It was a kind of collective madness and many politicians regretted what they had done or said. In the year 2000, continuous news networks were created on television everywhere. In France, the revolution came when it became free on the digital network in 2005.
When the internet started in the late 90s, it was a source of information, but more like an encyclopaedia than a newspaper. Quickly, all the media came and opened a website. At first it was just AFP or Reuters reports and then the copy of some articles from the newspaper. It was free and generous. It killed the newspapers because everyone could read the same information without paying a cent. Now it's a bit different, because some of the articles are not free and only the main facts are free. The damage is done and we want more for nothing. Some are now using social media. I have set up my RSS feeds with different information sites all over the world. I have one from Asia, one from the USA, one from Europe, one for Africa, etc... And for more specialised topics I have other sites. It used to be a monthly magazine for one subject. I tried to read it monthly again, but they killed it with less editorial, more glitz, pictures and computer graphics. They made a website on paper and that's the mistake. I don't want that... I have my computer in my pocket now!
The arrival of the smartphone was a revolution: a real computer in my pocket. My first was a small Sony-Ericsson with more power than my first and second PCs. The web browser could read messages, but notifications came a little later. I've never been a fan of notifications, like not answering a phone call when I'm busy. But a lot of people want to be notified when there is something new in the news feed. Maybe so they can be the first to talk about it at the coffee machine? I don't know, but it's like they're missing something. Exactly the effect we had on the web or with continuous news. It doesn't matter if it's not new, but the same information in a different way. We MUST know, and we are captivated by these screens. Like a continuous news network, the smartphone always offers something to read through websites, applications and even games. New items in a game are part of the information we have to "eat". It's a drug! Look at the people who use instagram or pintesrest, scrolling up and down the pictures without saying anything, sometimes laughing alone... drug addicts.
The social networks came and with them we discovered a new world... and a new word: Dopamine. It's a neurotransmitter that gives us the feeling of pleasure, of doing something good. It's like a natural prize for our brain. In other words, it's like a natural drug produced by our body. And the social networks have created a new way to use it with likes, hearts, thumbs up, etc... Infobesity also uses dopamine. A message is something good. We can like it, we can share it, we can have the impression of being the first to know. My drug is reading my RSS feeds every day. For other people, it's scrolling through Instagram or Facebook to see new GIFS, new videos, news from a parent, new DLC for a game, etc... I can't have too many feeds in my social networks (Mastodon today). Too much is like an overdose for me, but with less danger. I'm not that kind of addict, a hardcore nerd. But I think it was too much for my health.
I have tried many news feeds, sometimes very light like CNN lite... and it was too much for me with more than 50 articles a day. I think there is too much information every day. When my grandfather read his newspaper, it was long, but he didn't read everything, and it wasn't more than 70 different subjects. I don't read daily newspapers any more because they want to be fast, they want to go on and on about the same thing, to take up space, but not to go too deeply into things. There are monthly magazines for that. There were... It's not the case for many of them now with the same racy fashion. And because I have an excess of information. I felt that my monthly press review and summary was impoverished. It no longer made sense to me. Even on 68knews, a light version of Google News, there are 60 news items a day in the "World" category. That's enough... and not enough because some topics are missing. If you want football or Formula 1, you'll find news even if the season is over. It's the same for IT, for photography, for any subject...
That's too much and my solution was to limit the RSS feeds: choose fewer feeds and limit the number of articles per day. It's fine now and I don't feel like I'm missing anything. I also have a radio or TV and I feel more informed than many of my colleagues or friends who don't care about what's going on in the world. I know that I follow every issue now, that sometimes it might be useful to know what's going on in the world of sensors, in the world of test benches, and not in the world of car sales. That's life, and I think we all have to work on ourselves if we suffer from infobesity. I also have periods where I feel I have too many feeds and sometimes too few. I'm limiting the social networks, I'm only using Mastodon now and I'm limiting the number of subscriptions. 100 might be a good number for me, but sometimes I mute some people who post too much. I don't like to read too much and with screens you lose concentration if you have too many demands. That's why I don't use notifications in browsers or on my smartphone. Even for email, it's only one automatic sync per day for personal emails....more when I'm waiting for something, but manually. With simple rules, you can feel lighter in this suffocating digital life. Or just log off!
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