Are You A Digital Junkie Suffering From Infomania

Are you a "modern digital junkie?" Do you suffer from infomania? Something tells me that this article describes a lot of us.

Psychologists have done studies on the negative effects of multitasking and decision fatigue, but the long-term consequences of this kind of information overload is unknown. In a survey done a few months ago by the digital mapping and analytics company Esri UK, 61% of respondents called “the need to read and keep track of information from too many sources” a serious concern in their daily lives and 45% said that “the stress of data overload has affected either their sleep or relationships with family or colleagues.” Fully a third of respondents reported that they had difficulty absorbing the content from all the emails, social media posts, news and documents they encountered.

I think that the digital revolution has allowed our natural "hoarding" tendancies to flourish. I think humans naturally want to amass stuff, in part, because of our selfish nature.

Traditionally there have been physical and social barriers to prevent hoarding. Financial limitations. Physical storage space. Social acceptability of having a lot of stuff. But with digital, none of those apply. The financial aspect is there, but nearly every break through in the technology sector is designed to circumvent that barrier.

I have like 1300 movies on my server. Probably 500-600 TV show episodes. 11,000+ songs and probably 5000 personal photos. I refuse to sell any of my CD's, DVD's, Blurays, Laserdiscs or video games. I have hoarding tendencies, and technology is my enabler.

You know, it's weird. We have threads here where people show off their storage capability and we all go "ooohhhh, ahhhh". Yet we watch a show like Hoarders and say "ewwww gross!" It's the same compulsion, just socially accepted.