Information Obesity

One of the most anxiety-producing problems in America is obesity. No one disputes that it shortens life, limits our activities and relationships and is getting worse. And, in most cases, it's caused by an uncontrolled appetite.

But America also has another problem due to lack of dietary discipline. This is what I call "information obesity". We are becoming bloated with information that is poured into us 24/7, and we can hardly move because of it.

Is this so bad? Yes, if we just look at its "nutritional value". Like the artery-clogging fats and starch sold in fast food outlets, most information we take in is cheap, useless and has the same flavor as what we ate yesterday. Which is why, of course, we love it so.

One example, a relatively harmless one, is the "Top 10" grossing movies of the week. We are told that last week's Number 1 was "knocked off" by this week's entry. This is true, if you only look at raw numbers, but where is the competition anyway? The new Number 1 wasn't in release last week, so nobody could see it. But last week's Number 1 was seen by millions. Those same people were not going to see that same movie again, were they? Yet we still let the media pretend that this is an actual contest where the two movies are compared for the same thing!

But if we know it's phony, why do we still look at the list? We do it because it's "fun" to compare anything at all even if we know that the comparison is whimsical and statistically meaningless.

I've noticed that some papers have dropped the list altogether, probably because television gets the drop on the print media on the Sunday evening news, so it's already stale by Monday morning. Too bad.

But you can be sure that the statistics machine will be tweaked again for some new popularity contest so that we can be "hooked" again on a regular basis.

We just love those empty calories.