Why You Feel the Way You Do

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Data smog is not just the pile of unsolicited catalogs and spam arriving daily in our home and electronic mailboxes. It is also information that we pay handsomely for, that we crave--the seductive, mesmerizing quick-cut television ads and the 24-hour up-to-the-minute news flashes. It is the faxes we request as well as the ones we don't, it is the misdialed numbers and drippy sales calls we get during dinnertime, but it is also the Web sites we eagerly visit before and after dinner, the pile of magazines we pore through every month, and the dozens of channels we flip through whenever we get a free moment.

The blank spaces and silent moments in life are fast disappearing. Mostly because we have asked for it, media are everywhere. Televisions, telephones, radios, message beepers, and an assortment of other modern communication and navigational aids are now as ubiquitous as roads and tennis shoes--anywhere humans can go, all forms of media now follow: onto trains, planes, and automobiles; into hotel bathrooms; along jogging paths and mountain trails; on bikes and boats.

We've heard a lot lately about the moral decay evident in our entertainment packaging. But it isn't so much the content of the messages that should worry us as much their ubiquity, and it is critical to realize that information doesn't have to be unwanted and unattractive to be harmful.

On the Verge of an Epidemic
Perhaps the greatest story of acquisition and regret is that of the mythical Greek Prometheus, whose punishment for stealing fire and passing it down to human beings was to be chained naked to a pillar where each day a vulture tore out his liver. The liver was divinely replenished each night, and the vulture would return to eat it out again the following day. In his dialogue Protagoras, Plato puts this story into more contemporary perspective. It wasn't just fire that Prometheus took. It was techne, the knowledge of how to make things. The moral is, the price of technological know-how includes a pound of flesh.

Today the vultures still feed, occasioning a billion-dollar market for antacids. For all our abundance, ours is also an age of unprecedented stress, strain, headaches, and digestive problems--so much so, in fact, that tension relief has become one of our most vibrant industries. Three out of four Americans complain of chronic stress. Two out of every three visits to the family doctor are thought to be stress related, and the three top-selling prescription drugs are for ulcers, depression, and hypertension. Stress is also partly to blame, psychologists say, for the startling 300% increase in depression over the course of this century.

Stress can have many different sources, of course: financial strain, family pressures, medical problems, and so on. But in a society that has come to be so broadly defined by information technology, it is becoming increasingly clear that the information revolution sweeping us into a new realm of communication is also serving as one of our greatest stressors. Our fast-paced, high-stimulation society leaves many people complaining about being overwhelmed, while many others are becoming unhealthfully addicted to the mania.

"People seem to be developing a form of attention deficit disorder without inheriting it," says Dr. Theodore Gross, an expert on attention-span disorders. "The information explosion has something to do with it--all the faxes and E-mail and calls come in, and people can't keep up with it."

Attention deficit disorder (ADD), an increasingly common brain imbalance, causes acute restlessness and a propensity toward boredom and distraction. Victims of ADD often find it extraordinarily difficult to concentrate on any one thing for more than a few moments. Their minds wander, and they frequently find themselves involved in several things at once.

If those symptoms sound eerily familiar, it is because we may be on the verge of an ADD epidemic. While millions of Americans are thought to suffer from an inherited form of ADD, experts are now seeing a whole new manifestation of what they call "culturally induced ADD."

No matter how creatively we name it, however, the effects of information overload do not add up to one single debilitating syndrome that we can easily highlight, recoil in horror from, and muster a simple defense against. A careful review of 30 years of research reveals a wide variety of effects from information and stimulus overload, including, but not limited to, increased cardiovascular stress, weakened vision, confusion, frustration, impaired judgment, decreased benevolence, and overconfidence coupled with decreased accuracy.

As data smog changes the scope of our daily lives, our escapist fantasies evolve. Instead of jaunting off to savor intense new experiences, we design vacations of pure void. An editor friend of mine has just returned from a luxurious Caribbean vacation during which, he boasts, he had all the extravagances he desired: no TV, no radio, no newspaper, no computers. "My idea of pure bliss," he says, "is no information at all."

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