Information addiction

I read on but the curiosity in me grew to an urge, and the urge turned into a demand to know right then and there what the background story of the reference was. I became impatient and — absurdly — almost frustrated that the magazine could not give me the information I wanted to have at that moment. I tried to fight the urge but eventually ended up setting the magazine aside and reaching for my laptop to google the story.

Some fifteen years ago this wouldn’t have been possible. If I wanted to know something on a whim, I’d have to go to the library, find an almanac or encyclopedia and do some thorough research. In all likelihood in the above situation I would have just not bothered and continued reading the article, making a mental note to look up the reference later if I was still curious about it. Instead, after looking the reference up, I spent about two minutes reading the piece, which lead me to more curious links, so that eventually I ended up on a website that had nothing to do with the original article that I had wanted to read in the first place.

In this digital age we have become addicted to information: we now expect to find anything we want to know quickly and effortlessly. Search engines have adapted to this need by creating filtering options to search for very specific pieces of information, and even sometimes doing simple calculations for us instead of linking to sites that could help. While this may be very convenient for saving time, it has also decreased our capacity to think for ourselves.

Additionally, as this information addiction grows, our attention span understandably decreases: when bombarded with so much information from all angles, our minds cannot process it. As our brains become more adapted to multitasking, we seem to lose a certain depth of understanding of the information we absorb. It’s like we binge on information, gobbling up every piece of news thrown at us, just to purge our minds of it seconds later. This form of information bulimia blocks the flow of actual understanding and logical processing of the material. Additionally, it turns us into sharing machines, so we perpetuate the information bombardment by sharing the items we like through social media, blogs and various news-sharing sites. News sites have also adapted to this new habit of society: online articles are often barely a few sentences long. Some online newspapers even consider it sufficient to publish just the headline, as if they were ‘tweeting’ the news. Additionally, it seems that absolutely anything is considered newsworthy these days, as sites struggle to keep up with feeding the information-hungry masses. Quantity over quality seems to be the new motto of the information industry.

That is, of course, the flip-side of the coin. In this digital age, we have the luxury of a world of information at our fingertips; we just need to learn how to use this power wisely. Children growing up in the digital age should not only be taught how to use search engines, but how to distinguish the information they need from the mass of garbage that is out there, to learn to focus on a task and to think independently of computers. The human brain is after all a much more powerful and useful tool than a computer. Let’s keep it that way.

Olga Motsyk is an MSc aerospace engineering student from Kiev, Ukraine. She can be reached at olgamotsyk@gmail.com

Studenten volgen de vierjarige opleiding voor de helft in Leiden en voor de helft in Beijing. Ze krijgen van beide instellingen een diploma.

Double degree
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