I believe I am an information addict, and have been even before my family owned a computer or cell phone. Ever since I can remember, honestly. As a kid I was constantly reading books, usually starting a new one before finishing the old one. I would flip back and forth between 3 or 4 of them, as I got bored (I finished them all, eventually). I would read cereal boxes at the breakfast table, magazines in the bathroom, shampoo bottles while taking a shower, and sneak books into family parties instead of playing outside with the other kids my age. I’ve always read faster than anyone I compared myself to, without having to try. Stealth brag, sort of, but it’s nearly become a curse.
Access to a personal computer (especially online gaming and tabbed browsing) has not helped, in this regard. I rarely finish a full activity before moving on to the next one, because I quickly get bored with/inured to old information and need to seek something new. My brain is always searching frantically for new tidbits of information, even if it’s completely useless and stupid and irrelevant (it’s new! It’s dopamine! Who cares? MOAR!). Here’s a reasonable approximation of the thought process behind an average internet experience of mine (it’s like a goddamn *Family Guy *episode without the laugh track):
click on that youtube video!oh that reminds me of hunger games,i better download that e-book!oh,let’s look up that movie on imdb and see what primrose looks like irl!ooh, naturally brown eyes with blonde hair, how cool is that?i wonder what people are saying about her!how did they pick her for this role?WHOA CRAZY UNIBROW FOR A LITTLE WHITE GIRL!hey her last name is shields and brooke shields had epic eyebrows in pretty baby when SHE was 12,I wonder if they’re related?hey I should really re-watch the professional*,*natalie portman was a super-sweet child actress…
In my teens, I was better able to channel my desire for more information into my studies, and I did really well in school. But that got boring, too, and I never finished college (I changed majors 4 times in the 4.5 years I was there). And now, I feel like every day is a constant struggle to cram more crap into my brainhole, without regard for anything except its newness. My attention span is miniscule and getting smaller every year. I can’t even imagine a job I would enjoy because of this pattern: I get good at something, get bored, stop caring, and either drop it or (in the case of my current job) do what I have to to get by, while secretly seething the whole time.
Obviously humanity is wired to crave knowledge, and being an info-junkie does **not **make me a unique snowflake. But I feel like I’m *so *prone to it that it’s having a major negative effect on my life. And I don’t believe it’s something that technology has brought unto me, I feel like it’s who I am. Even if I had the discipline to unplug myself from the internet (which I don’t), I’d just be back on books and/or tv again. If I tried to unplug myself from books and tv, I think I might go *delightfully *mad.
Anyway, doest ye have any advice? Commiseration? Derision? I’d welcome any stories about your own information addiction (and possibly overcoming it, if you did, but even if you didn’t), because it’d help me feel better about mine.
No advice, but I am the same way - I read obsessively. At work when I am not busy, I’m constantly checking the news, reading my messageboards, or reading wikipedia and then tracking down verification for the things I read. When I get home, its straight on to the iPad and Flipboard, where I have 20 of my favorite information sources ready to read. Once I have finished those, I check my messageboards again.
I can’t help it. I have an uncontrollable need to know more.
I, too, strive for enlightenment and have always been what you might consider an information adict. I don’t think it’s a problem. Digging for information is just an outlet that allows you to feed your mind. However, this:
seem more than simply a thirst for knowledge. I do not usually experience this phenomenon with getting bored with information quickly and moving from activity to activity before completion. I usually think of my information finding as a way of becoming an expert in whatever it is I’m researching. So, I’ll get all the information I can on a topic and keep at it until I’m satisfied that a random person might actually think I was an expert in that field.
See, I envy people who are sufficiently disciplined to buckle down like this. I flit around like a freaking dilettante. I truly love (like, more than a friend) so many vastly different areas of knowledge. But I glean a shallow knowledge of a whole bunch of varied topics, and end up master of none. /crymeariver.jpg
In the end, I guess it feels like… if I spend too much time on one thing, I get upset with myself for neglecting everything else I should be learning about. I can’t spend too much time on black holes, or else I might forget the IPA symbols.
I suppose I should see someone to get that possibility addressed. I guess I can see how ADD might describe the mental process I’m going through, but I would never have gotten diagnosed with that as a child because I devoted so much of myself to my studies. It doesn’t exactly seem to fit the criteria. I never had trouble getting my homework done, or sitting still. I loved my teachers and was strongly motivated to gain their approval. And, my constant info-quests can keep me seated in one place for hours at a time (with bathroom breaks, of course).
I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with this. It’s certainly not dumb. Some people are generalists; some people are specialists.
I’m reminded of the old quote (which, a bit of googling reveals, gets attributed to all sorts of different people, from William Mayo to Gandhi) that “an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less, until he knows everything about nothing.”
There’s a book about Internet reading habits by Nicolas Carr. There have also been several studies about it.
The results are kind of mixed, though it does appear that access to such volumes of information so quickly via the Internet changes the way we read and think.
I don’t think what you’re experiencing is information addiction. Maybe it’s a product of the way information is presented to how or how frequently you try to multi-task (which makes you - general you - less able to focus on a specific topic).
I’d welcome any stories about your own information addiction (and possibly overcoming it, if you did, but even if you didn’t), because it’d help me feel better about mine.