How To Survive Infoxication

Infoxication is the information overload caused by the amount of information and content that is available to us on the Internet. It was Alfons Conerlla, founder and president of Infonomy, who coined the term at the end of 1999. It can be said that it is the disease of the digital society of the early 21st century. Therefore, we should learn to survive infoxication.

We currently have access to countless sources of information. News reaches everywhere immediately, newspapers and digital magazines flood the network. We have the technological means to be continuously informed and most of us have that curiosity that motivates us to know what is happening in our environment and, also in many cases, in the rest of the world.

The consequence is that we receive millions of informational impacts that our mind – due to the number – does not have the capacity to process. When this happens, we say that we are infoxicated.

We are overloading ourselves with information

We live connected to a medium that generates an  amount of information that no other medium had generated before. The inputs that were received in the past are far from those that we receive today, the ease of accessing real or invented information has nothing to do with it either.

For example, in the 1960s a normal person had access to about 18 radio stations, 4 television channels and 4,500 magazine titles. We now have access to more than 2.4 billion Internet radio stations, 20 million websites, and 18,000 magazine titles. These figures impose right?

Another factor also comes into play: we are talking about the ability to communicate instantly, to send a huge amount of information in an instant and at almost no cost. In a short time we will multiply the number of messages we receive by 10. This can become unmanageable. Thus, surviving infoxication becomes one more challenge in our lives.

The problem itself is not the technology

The main problem of infoxication is not technological, although it may seem that it is. The problem we face is cultural or sociological. We could call it: the problem of information distress.

And it is that we have more information than we can handle and we do not have time to absorb all that information. Therefore, the problem is not only technological. Information will multiply in the future much faster than our ability to generate technology to handle this excessive flow of information.

From now on, managing information is going to be an increasingly important part of our daily work (unless you live on a lost mountain). An added problem is that nobody trains us to learn how to manage that information. Surviving infoxication thus becomes a complicated task in which we have no choice but to be self-taught.

We must learn to seek and ask questions

The reporting process would have to start with what you each consider your critical information to be. The first thing I should know is what I am interested in being informed about. But this is where we start to fail.

Typically, the information that people receive is done by chance. We stumble upon information without looking for it. We could say that this is where infoxication begins. To survive infoxication we should start with this aspect.

In this universe of information,  we must be very clear about what our critical information is, what we are going to pay attention to and what we cannot be informed of. Once this is identified, you know what your themes are.

However, we would have to know how to search. But no, we don’t know how to find the information that is relevant to us. With few exceptions, we do not know how to ask questions of a machine like the computer or possibly ask a person questions. It is a skill that we must learn.

Some tools to survive infoxication

Surviving infoxication is not an easy task, but we have seen that it will soon be essential. To do this, we must have a series of tools that allow us to organize the excess of information. Some of these tools are as follows:

• Feedly and Bloglovin. They are feed readers that you can organize by tags. With Feedly we can share content on the main social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.
• Netvibes. In addition to being a feed reader, it is a virtual desktop in the style of the now-defunct iGoogle.
• Flipboard. Flipboard is another feed reader. You can connect your social networks to it as well. The published news becomes a kind of digital magazine.
• Instapaper and Pocket. They make it easy for us to save articles, web pages and more so that we can enjoy them later. Instapaper is paid and Pocket is free.
• Evernote. It is an organizer in which you can save, synchronize and share files, create notebooks, save documents, etc. It is a great tool for organizing information. It has the ability to synchronize with your computer, tablet and mobile.

There are many other tools that will allow us to survive infoxication, of course. What is really important is that we learn to search for the information that is relevant to us and for this it is necessary to learn to ask the appropriate questions in the search tools.