There are days when I feel like I'm suffering from an eating disorder ported to information consumption. Days when I sit in front of my screen and it becomes a door to a world wide-open fridge of stuff beckoning to be stuffed down my media gullet. The desire, the hunger to know drives me to uncontrolled content-binging. Never savouring what I'm reading, watching, looking at. Always ready to bite into the next link, a different book. Change that CD. Change that channel. A broth of unorchestrated tastes found in a miriad different subjects brings to the boil a sense of nausea. No pleasure, no gain, just my mind feeling overweight, saturated in cultural fat. Food for thought deep-fried into laxative dreams. My meta-nausea turns physical. Doubled over by data-cramps, I broadcast my bile and choke.
Every once in awhile someone will write down something so similar to what I have been thinking or experiencing it will have an odd sensory effect as I read it. This is one of those.
Posted by: Swami at November 18, 2003 09:05 PMIf information is a drug, then sports info must surely be the heroin. Every once in a while I awaken with no evidence of the past few hours save a trail of ever spreading sports stats are rumors sites and the blue and orange of the Knicks and Mets echoing through my optic nerves. Where have I been? what have I done? will Piazza get traded to an American League team?
The fatty foods are just the start, watch out. The final nirvana is in the casino or on the trading floor. Pure packets of info flying by. Ride one, sell one, sell the house to ride that knowledge of that pony to a million dollars.
Posted by: Abe at November 18, 2003 09:49 PMThat is an excellent metaphor for information overload.
Sometimes I feel like an information anorexic if you will...and just shut off everything. It feels great for a few hours or even a few days, until I get anxious I'm missing something. It does tend to refine the diet though...every time I go "offline" and then come back, I add back fewer and fewer items to consume. So it's a good thing.
Posted by: maki at November 19, 2003 01:49 PMthat summed up my sentiments exactly...
as i lay in bed at night, the first few minutes of staring into the back of my eyelids is a disturbing cornucopia of images branded in my brain.
Posted by: FeRN at November 25, 2003 08:51 AMHe who wishes to secure the good of others has already secured his own.
Posted by: Seltzer Dan at January 10, 2004 11:17 AM