Information Fatigue Syndrome (IFS)

While Googling is becoming the routing apparatus in our daily information seeking exercise, Dr David Lewis first suggested a new phenomenon, information fatigue syndrome, which emerged as a direct result of the information revolution. He also came up with its symptoms which include the paralysis of the analytical capacity, constant searches for more information, increased anxiety and sleeplessness, as well as increasing self-doubt in decision-making. How many of you becoming highly stressed through trying to cope with the huge amounts of information bombardment from books, journals, e-mails and the Internet? I'm a real victim of this newly coined syndrome but I really don't know whether it is some kind of hyper-aroused psychological condition. It is a disorder as per the Reuters report on Dying for Information which argues particularly affects the group called knowledge workers whose jobs mainly involves dealing with and processing information. In fact almost everyone suffering with this newly coined disorder or becoming victimized at a rapid rate.

Now we have gone beyond information overload to the point of information pollution which leads to the contamination of a culture or of a person's life by excessive data. I wouldn't be surprise to hear information environmentalism, a movement that seeks to reduce information pollution and its effects on people. We are not yet ready to meet challenges of excessive amount of information that causes stress and weariness but we are getting used to this exhaustion although it brings mental stress.

Feature fatigue caused by products that come with large number of ever changing features. Yet some find it quite exciting to deal with but when it comes to decision making, number of features brings more confusion than contentment. I am still shopping for my latest large screen flat panel TV yet still finding difficult to settle with one product. I am tired of comparing varied options starting from aspect ratio to interlace and progressive broadcast standards. I started my research on last May, since then some of the products have drastically dropped prices and new models with more enhanced features have replaced some of the `discontinued models`. Finally I decided to go with Sony X series 116cm LCD but now they have dropped the price of X series 127cm LCD!!

Another interesting dimension of IFS is disposophobia. The fear of throwing things out; I'm happily suffering from this phobia as well. If your music library contains thousands of tracks or your portable hard disk is full of `torrented` hundreds of hours of recorded TV shows or movies and also having uncountable numbers of digital photos, and more e mail addresses and social networking accounts that hard to track….you also suffering with disposophobia.