To this day, the Guatemalan Mayans remark that outsiders note down things not in order to remember them, but rather so as not to remember them. Today’s world of hyperconnectivity often leads us to wonder whether our reliance on technology for knowledge and time management is beginning to “soften” our brains and make them less sharp. The Mayans might be right after all.
Cutting off from the technology and information highway for three weeks offered a good opportunity to experience full reliance on the cerebellum. It was not just organisational zen but also a break from “information anxiety”. Information anxiety is that feeling that seems to be building up daily as we gain access to more information and begin to choke when we realise that we cannot possibly take it all in at one go.
The feeling begins with a glance at an interesting link or headline on a website. Possibly this comes certified with a hundred “likes” – the modern-day stamp of recommendation. Your mental sieve takes note and the urge to take that particular path on the ether begins to take shape. But there are other links on the page – other bits of news or information that are vying for your attention. What can you possibly do?
There’s different techniques and approaches. You could hoard links on some bookmarking website while convincing yourself that some time in the future a gap in the time-space continuum will allow you to “catch up”. Incidentally the “catch up” business is rather lame. Is it a race? Is there really somebody in the lead who has read tomes upon tomes on all kinds of subjects? Does a modern day walking, talking and web-browsing equivalent of the famed Alexandrian library exist?
You could also skim through summaries or subtitles getting the general gist of the content while being subconsciously painfully aware that you are fast becoming the internet equivalent of a jack of all trades and master of none. That would also mean learning to live with that ghost of a feeling that during your “skimming” you missed out on the really crucial, interesting part that was really worth reading. That’s information anxiety all over again.
Or you could step off the train. Step off and watch the carousel zip before your eyes as statuses are updated in your absence, news items are created, revised and rewritten while you are in a blissful corner of informational oblivion. Peeping in from time to time to assuage the withdrawal symptoms you will connect less and less with the threads and webs that have formed in your absence. You will worry less. Care less even. Anxiety what anxiety?
Before you know it, information gathering might even take its good old familiar linear form. You will have regained your sanity and your calm. It might not last very long and you might soon be wishing to be back sucking at the nipple of information overdose but trust me, the kick you get from that momentary lapse of reason might even get addictive and before you know it you could be stepping off the train.
And this time it will be for good.
