LICKING THE RAZOR’S EDGE

Addiction #26 – the challenge of INFORMATION

“He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

“The flood of information that swamps me daily seems to produce more pain than gain. And it’s not just the incoming tidal wave of email messages and RSS feeds that causes me grief. It’s also the vast ocean of information I feel compelled to go out and explore in order to keep up.” ~ Paul Hemp

“The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view slowly destroys everybody who has one.” ~ Brooks Atkinson

Let me initially state that gathering information is not “bad” in and of itself. The problem is not that we collect facts or that we strive to understand our world. Many thousands of years ago, when our species was in its adolescence, our world was filled with threats and dangers, and it was downright prudent to continually evaluate our surroundings in order to survive. And today, in a modern world that is exceedingly complex and sometimes quite confusing, gathering information in order to enhance the quality of our lives remains a reasonable pursuit as well. It is helpful for us to notice the difference between situations that are “healthy” and those that are not, and it makes sense to analyze our surroundings in order to then be able to choose courses of action that are more in alignment with our personal values and goals.

And yet for most of us, such a reasonable pursuit of knowledge is no longer what motivates us. In a world where imminent dangers are rare and legitimate information needs are few, we have simply taken our “need to know” too far … way too far.

The problem is not that we gather information efficiently – or even that we are gathering lots of information. The problem, rather, is WHAT information we are gathering, and HOW we are choosing to gather it.

According to the 2012 PEW News Consumption Survey, almost 60% of Americans watch almost an hour of news on television every day. In addition, over half of all Americans read or watch at least 40 minutes of news online each day, 33% listen to at least 45 minutes of radio news each day, 25% read a newspaper for at least 30 minutes each day, and over 20% get news reports daily via their social networks or on Twitter.

Every day, over 200 million people access Facebook via their mobile device, and according to web analyst Ken Burbary, the average Facebook user spends almost 16 hours logged on every month.

In a recent study, David Vance, assistant professor at Rutgers-Camden University, extrapolated that a third of all BlackBerry users show signs of addiction similar to those seen in alcoholics.

Quite obviously, we humans are literally “drowning in reality”; gasping and choking on a constant deluge of “facts” and opinions – most of them negatively dreary or provocatively fearful; a flood of information to which many of us have become literally – and disastrously – addicted.

RECOGNIZING YOUR OWN ADDICTION to INFORMATION

As with any other addiction, treatment first requires recognition. After all, we cannot release our unhealthy behaviors and replace them with healthier ones if we do not know how those behaviors manifest themselves in our everyday lives.

Keeping this in mind, feel free to invest in your personal Freedom by honestly answering the following questions:

Do you check your emails “first thing” in the morning?

Do you check your email more than once a day?

Do you feel agitated or stressed or anxious after watching a news program?

Do you have difficulty turning off your television or your laptop before going to bed?

Do you have difficulty sleeping after turning off your television or laptop?

Do you interrupt or ignore conversations to be able to hear “breaking news”?

Do you tune-in to 24-hour news stations more than you watch intermittent news programs?

Do you feel agitated if you feel like you don’t know what is happening in the world?

Do you want to know all “important news” as soon as it happens?

Would you rather watch a bad reporter on an unreliable news program than no reporter or no program at all?

Do you regularly focus on the world’s pains, crises, tragedies and problems? Do you feel that the world is a “mess”, or that things are “headed to Hell in a hand-basket”?

Do you have difficulty behaving calmly during stressful situations?

Do you respond to hateful actions and “evil deeds” with anger more than compassion?

Do you snap at others when annoyed by them?

Do you feel anxious or paranoid when visiting the “bad parts of town”?

Do you find ways to bring up news topics while hanging out with your friends?

Do you ever cancel or delay going to a social engagement in order to watch an “important story” on the news?

Do you periodically check your email or a news app on your phone while hanging out with others?

Do you feel “naked” or nervous without your phone or when you cannot access the Internet?

Do you regularly watch or listen to Jon Stewart, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, or any similar news pundit?

Do you subscribe to or regularly read news magazines like Time, Newsweek or US news & World Report?

Do you subscribe to or regularly read a newspaper?

Do you follow the news through an email provider like google or yahoo?

Do you watch or listen to morning news shows while getting ready for work?

Do you think it is important to “be informed”?

Do you watch “reality TV”?

Do you enjoy reading and/or memorizing trivia?

Do you enjoy sharing inane tidbits of information and obscure facts with your friends?

Do you enjoy arguing or, when bored, do you incite arguments?

Do you read to yourself more than you communicate with others?

The SOURCE of our INFORMATION ADDICTION

Chances are you answered “yes” to quite a few of the previous questions. If so, it doesn’t make you a “bad person” … It simply makes you a human being like most other human beings; a human being who is at least mildly addicted to gathering information.

But why are we so addicted? Why do we feel so compelled to “know the truth” and “be informed” and “figure life out”?

Well, it turns out that information gathering – both physiologically and psychologically – is highly addictive.

First of all, whenever we experience acts that are believed to promote our survival (such as eating, drinking, having sex or receiving large amounts of money) the neurotransmitter dopamine is released along the “pleasure pathways” of our brains – providing us with feelings of physical ecstasy and emotional euphoria. It doesn’t take too many repetitions of these “life enhancing” behaviors before our brains naturally begin to crave more and more of the dopamine rush they trigger.

What is especially interesting, at least as far as this article is concerned, is that we humans experience the same dopamine “fix” whenever we hear and register a piece of new information. Processing the characteristics of our surroundings is perceived to be valuable to our continued survival, and so we are chemically rewarded for doing so.

In this way, we become physically addicted to knowledge.

The second manner in which we become hooked on information is a psychological-emotional one. Every time we apply a few “fact” to our lives and a positive result ensues, we remember our success and subconsciously look for similar information in all our future encounters. As we continue to gather more and more “facts” similar to those that brought us pleasure in the past, we begin to mold those “facts” into a belief system. In this way, we become emotionally addicted to the “facts” that harmonize with our beliefs, and to reject, ignore or avoid those that don’t.

Every time we encounter a piece of information that “fits” our world view, we feel secure and comfortable – and dopamine is released as an encouragement to search for similar information that will duplicate the effect. In contrast, every time we encounter a bit of knowledge that is either unfamiliar or contradictory to our world view, we shy away from it – no dopamine is released, and we look for different, “more accurate” information elsewhere.

In this way, we become psycho-emotionally addicted to looking for — and finding — “the facts”.

“News, particularly daily news, is more addictive than crack cocaine, more addictive than heroin, more addictive than cigarettes. ” ~ Dan Rather

The CONSEQUENCES of our ADDICTION to INFORMATION

It is important for us all to realize that our information addiction – regardless of how it manifests itself – is anything but harmless. Indeed, the often compulsively ignorant ways we gather our data have consequences for our lives that are as far-reaching as they are destructive.

*HARM #01: INFORMATION ADDICTION DULLS our BRAINS

Ironically, the more strive to obsessively fill our brains with “facts” and “truths”, the less efficiently those brains become at processing that information.

In 2010, there were about 1.2 zettabytes of information available on the Internet. (One zettabyte, by the way, is equal to one BILLION terabytes – and one terabyte is equal to one MILLION megabytes.) While machines can transfer all this data at 2,000,000 bits per second, a human brain can only absorb 126.

Also in 2010, there were over 255 million websites online, there were over 107 trillion emails mailed, and there were over 25 billion tweets sent.

What this all means is that there is way more information out there than anyone could ever hope to effectively process. In fact, in order to function at all in such an “information overload”, we have been forced to alter the ways we focus and learn.

We allow incoming mails and tweets and newsflashes to interrupt our conversations and our activities. We then are forced to rapidly “skim” the incoming information to sort out which interruptions are important to enough to require an efficient response. As a consequence, our attention spans have been dramatically shortened and our ability to concentrate has been dramatically lessened.

There is so much information out there that we subconsciously believe that we need to stuff more and more information into our brains just to keep up. Ironically enough, the more of this information we wolf down, the LESS we actually understand about the world.

You see, the basis of all real understanding is grounded in the realization that all things are connected by what separates them. Information addiction, on the other hand, requires that we take thousands and thousands of bits of information and sort them according to how they are different. The more we “learn”, the more differences we identify – the more differences we identify, the more complex our world becomes – and the more complex our becomes, the less we deeply comprehend its underlying Meanings.

In essence, the more we learn, the less we know; the “smarter” we get, the dumber we function.

“The addictive nature of the Web can leave you with an attention span of about nine seconds … the same attention span as a goldfish.” ~ the BBC

*HARM #02: INFORMATION ADDICTION INSTILLS SADNESS & FEAR

In order to keep you “plugged in”, the news strives to shock you out of your sense of complacency. In practice this means that it has to either depress you, scare you or anger you. Studies have shown that by far most of the stories shown on TV and Internet newscasts are related to crime, disaster or war. In contrast, public service announcements and other “positive” stories account for less than 1% of that same air-time.

More importantly, studies have also shown that the folks who watch such negative news programs are significantly sadder and more anxious than those of us who do not. And not only that – those same people also showed a tendency to respond to future anxieties by “catastrophizing” them; meaning that those who watch negative news reports tend to fixate on a particular worry so persistently that they believe it to be far worse than it actually is – and thereby also suffer far higher levels of anxiety and stress than they normally would feel.

In essence, gorging on the negative information with which we are being force-fed is causing many of us to live unnecessarily angry, sad and fearful lives.

“Everyone in our culture has been polluted by the garbage of this world, and we all need to be washed clean. We need minds that are uncluttered so they can be free to dream again.” ~ Shane Claiborne

*HARM #03: INFORMATION ADDICTION DESTROYS RELATIONSHIPS

This is by far the most sinister (and by far the least recognized) of all the harmful consequences of information overload. In our information-obese society, it has become socially acceptable to turn away from meals, interrupt conversations and break off social engagements just to deal with incoming messages or attend to “breaking news”.

Even more harmful is the phenomenon of “self-marginalization”, where the more information we process, the more isolated we become as individuals. Basically, the more we notice the differences between the different bits of information we are absorbing, the more we also subconsciously identify those things as being significantly different from ourselves. If this psychological dynamic is not consciously noticed and checked, we slowly yet steadily lose the ability to listen to others sincerely. We also lose the ability to have empathy for those others, and we lose the ability to express our love &/or compassion for them.

In essence, the more we “know”, the less we feel …
The more we “understand” our world, the less we truly understand ourselves.

“Stop learning and start knowing … When a rose opens, it falls outward.” ~ Rumi

Filed under: Licking the Razor's Edge (freedom from hidden addictions) by Scaughdt