Symptoms

Throughout the book, Johnson (pictured below)

first gives the symptoms of overconsumption, describes how to master data literacy, and finally gives you the skills and knowledge to master consuming knowledge. Let’s begin with the symptoms of information overconsumption. Johnson talks about six main ones; however, there are many other symptoms out there that we may have not even discovered yet. The five main symptoms are: apnea, poor sense of time, loss of social breadth, distorted sense of reality, and attention fatigue. The first, apnea, is the irregularity in body rates due to technology. For example, “email apnea” is when your breathing and heart rate is irregular during the times you are checking or writing emails. Other irregularities could include your heart rate speeding up when you receive a text message. Many times, this increase in heart rate doesn’t slow until you actually check the message. This apnea could come with serious consequences, like lack of oxygen in your body that could lead to other serious issues. The next symptom, poor sense of time, is when time becomes distorted to us. For example, when we spend hours looking through our email inboxes, even though it only feels like a few minutes. The next symptom is loss of social breadth, which means we tend to build relationships with people who share similar views. By doing this, we eliminate the social inputs that bring us news we disagree with. This then leads to the overconsumption of specialized knowledge. The fourth symptom is distorted sense of reality. This happens when people are ignorant when looking at information. Information ignorance can lead to picking up a bias on something, which means sacrificing something for it, like time or money, and then becoming invested into that idea.