the watch of time

The meeting theme this week at our Toastmasters’ Club concerned one of the banes of modern life, especially in social media oriented, western societies – information overload.

Intrusive, geometrically expanding exposure to information and sources, the latter exhibiting wide latitudes of dependability, variously affects us all.

Many people seem to feel that the pervasiveness of the internet is the biggest culprit contributing to what is now a new term for the stress related condition, namely Information Fatigue Syndrome (IFS). As the late, great comedian George Carlin once observed, one of the notable evolutions of our time is the capacity to add more words and syllables to descriptions of human health-related issues.

It’s not always easy to determine if we have reached a plateau of information overload.

Here are some signs to watch for:

• Payment options come in a manual
• You’ve been deleting messages for an hour, but have only caught up to last week
• There are seventeen ways to describe filling salt and pepper shakers
• The dentician provides a reference app for possible outcomes of teeth cleaning
• Instructions are provided for reading instructions
• One longs for the good old days of no electricity
• Medication is required when contemplating opening emails or texts
• You can’t figure out what spell check wants you to do
• If there’s no stress in a situation, it doesn’t feel right
• You can’t experience a blue mood without wondering if the shade should be different
• When your neighbour says hello, you look for meta-meaning
• You battle through so many pop-ups on-line you can’t enjoy baseball anymore