Burnout and Information Technologies
Our creation of information technologies created an information layer overtop of nature. It has lead to mental health issues. Can tech help solve these issues?
Magazines (online and print), journals, online news, all double their sales and increase click rates when they feature stories about dealing with stress, burnout, depression and anxiety. Sales of drugs that improve focus, help us think and work faster (Ritalin, Aderall, Taurin etc.) and related products like super caffeinated beverages are rising.
This may well have a lot to do with information communication technologies (ICT), like social media, browsers, smartphones and the apps we use, messaging services from WhatsApp to Telegram and iMessenger. The fact that everything is always on, always communicating, 24/7, 365 days a year at a global scale. Our brains can’t sync with this rate of communication.
ICT tools enable us to start a conversation and walk away, only to come back with it still going on. An exponential change from just over thirty years ago.
Our brains evolved to manage a certain information environment; nature. To understand and interpret the land around us, the weather. The movement of animals and the plants around them. To watch where the bees were going to get that sweet honey.
A great example of this is Indigenous First People’s languages. The Mi’kmaq and many others use verbs to describe the features of nature such as hills, mountains and valleys because they are always changing. Western European languages use adjectives because we don’t see the nature in the same way. We see it as fixed.. It never has been.
Eventually, we created language, then writing, then the printing press, radio, television, computers, the internet. And here we are. We’ve created an additional information environment. One that flows over top of nature. That is solely a human created environment.
We created this digital information environment because it is part of being human. It started with language because we inherently understood that working together helped us live longer and get more honey from the bees.
But now, as I’ve recently written, we are in a bit of a conundrum. We are creating more information, at faster speeds than our brains can process at both an individual and group, perhaps societal, level. It’s what sociologists call a temporal rebound effect.
We see this in such terms as FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), memes to distill complex ideas into simple statements. What we termed “zoom fatigue” as the tiredness we experience from too many video meetings during the day. Especially during the pandemic.
One hope is that Artificial Intelligence can help reduce the effects of information overload and the rebound effect of ICTs. Thus reducing all the issues that go alongside having to manage so much information in our daily lives; anxiety, depression, stress and burnout, sleep disorders, drug and alcohol abuse.
The dominant economic system in our world today versus in the past, is capitalism. It’s very nature demands constant cycles of innovation and increases in speed. This creates a dynamic environment of information speeding up along with production of goods and services.
The gap between what information technologies can do and our brains, thus culture and society leads to a disconnect. They can’t synchronize. Transhumanists have a lovely fantasy idea that this can be solved by sticking wires into our skulls and attaching computers to them. This is becoming possible, but will it become culturally acceptable? Will it solve the side effects our brains deal with as a result of this additional information environment? We don’t yet know.
An unshakable law of time is that it is the only dimension in our lives that cannot be increased or augmented. Time can only be compressed or condensed. Your to-do list can grow, but your available time cannot.
The way we will, as a species, likely deal with this is through elements of culture such as traditions, norms and behaviours, social governance, economic and political systems. But all of that takes time. These elements of culture move much slower than information technologies. This in itself creates challenges.
The reality is that for now, this gap, this disconnect between what our brains can handle and what information technologies can do will be around a little while longer. But now we understand what’s happening, we can figure out how to evolve. And technology will help us do that. AI, if we can figure it out, may help us. Mind the gap.