We are living in a time of exponential growth in information and data that not only affects our working life, but permeates our personal life as well. Just looking at the growth in storage capacity of computers drives this point home.

From the smallest BIT of information to the largest BRONTOBYTE of data, there is a huge growth in data. In trying to put this into perspective, consider:

  • A BIT is the smallest unit of data that a computer uses.
  • Many of us have heard of MEGABYTES or GIGABYTES. A CD-ROM will hold 600 megabytes. In contrast, one gigabyte can hold the contents of 10 yards of books on a shelf.
  • TERABYTES are the up and coming data term. One terabyte can hold 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. That’s a LOT of data!
  • An EXABYTE is equivalent to one quintillion bytes. Some say that five EXABYTES would be equal to all of the words ever spoken by mankind.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkley have estimated that humans are generating in excess of two exabytes of new information annually. There’s nothing to compare most of the higher terms to. But just that we have all these terms for the amount of data and that we keep expanding in terms of what we consider to be our standard gives one pause to think!

We can’t hold all of this in our brains, either in our short-term or long-term memory. TMI … Too Much Information.

As a nurse, though, I can attest to the fact that we once thought we could keep important aspects of patient care in our heads in the 1970s. Then we started jotting notes to keep in our pockets and putting charge stickers all over our uniforms. We then moved to our expandable pockets that we filled with reference texts that weighed us down. Now, however, we’re at a point where we not only need information but we need reliable, usable, evidence-based information that we can locate at the point of care, precisely at the time we need it, without taking a lot of time.

We’ve had an information explosion!

We’re suffering from infoluenza! Sounds plausible, but just what is infoluenza?

Link to the book on amazon.com

Luke Naismith from Melbourne, Australia first coined this term after reading Clive Hamilton’s and Richard Denniss’ book entitled Affluenza: When too much is never enough. You can click on the image of the book and be taken to Amazon.com for a description of the book and people’s (pretty positive) reactions to it.

Affluenza is a disease … a disease of our attachment to materialism. We have more money, but we’re deeper in debt. We have larger houses, but smaller families. It’s the keeping up with the Joneses syndrome in ever increasing proportions.

As a side note, Hamilton’s and Denniss’ book is about Australian affluenza. A corrollary Affluenza book about American society is also available on Amazon. Might make for some interesting comparisons.

So, back to Luke Naismith and his term infoluenza. In his Knowledge Futures blog, Naismith defined infoluenza as:

  1. The frustrated, overwhelmed and unfulfilled feeling that results from continued efforts to broaden information or knowledge management systems.
  2. An epidemic of confusion, vendor hype, paralysis by analysis, and suspect decision-making caused by dogged pursuit of a Technology Nirvana.
  3. An unsustainable addiction to incorporating more and more information.

Essentially, people desire more content and more information, and ever more content and ever more information. But our attachment to information resources fails us as we search for deeper meaning. Infoluenza becomes

a disease of not being able to understand the limitations of deriving contentment from content alone.

This is one reason that in his Patterns and Sensemaking presentation Siemens talked about information visualization and non-text ways of presenting and reviewing data and information for meaning.

Siemens referred to a quote by David Gelernter:

If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don’t bother.

At some point, it’s just not useful to keep adding narrative and verbiage to things. At some point, we are overtaken by infoluenza. At some point, we need the overloadatorium!

Steve Gilbert of the TLT Group started an overloadatorium blog … just what all of us suffering from infoluenza need.

Finally, if you’re looking for some cures for infoluenza specifically, check out Jack Vinson’s blog, Knowledge Jolt with Jack, that provides a list of 7 analgesics.

Good luck with managing your infoluenza. Try not to inflict your addiction with information and content on poor unsuspecting students who would prefer to understand the meaning and context of things … not merely meaningless lists of “stuff.” If you’ve got some good ideas to make sure infoluenza stays under control, let me know!