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This is how I feel: too much random information online, very hard to find what you are really interested in, being annoyed by having to sift through the random photos and poorly written pieces, or pieces that recur too much. The abundance of often false opinions being pushed down your throat.

Is there a term that describes this information oversaturation causing the feeling of fatigue?

Grammar Addict
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15 Answers15

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Information overload (also known as infobesity or infoxication):

  • refers to the difficulty a person can have understanding an issue and making decisions that can be caused by the presence of too much information. The term is popularized by Alvin Toffler in his bestselling 1970 book Future Shock, but is mentioned in a 1964 book by Bertram Gross, The Managing of Organizations.

Speier et al. (1999) stated:

  • Information overload occurs when the amount of input to a system exceeds its processing capacity. Decision makers have fairly limited cognitive processing capacity. Consequently, when information overload occurs, it is likely that a reduction in decision quality will occur.

(Wikipedia)

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"Infoglut" is another alternative to "information overload".

Infoglut as defined by BusinessDictionary.com:

Information glut. Masses of continuously increasing information, so poorly catalogued or organized (or not organized at all) that it is almost impossible to navigate through them to search or draw any conclusion or meaning.

Read more: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/infoglut.html#ixzz40YP6OiN1

Kristina Lopez
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    Who on earth thinks up these ridiculous words! Probably some computer nerd. The sad thing is that they find their way into mainstream dictionaries. It wouldn't happen with French. – BillJ Feb 18 '16 at 20:38
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    What @BillJ? You didn't have a problem with "infobesity" or "infoxication"? lol! Just upvote my answer and all will be forgiven! ;-) – Kristina Lopez Feb 18 '16 at 20:41
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    Oh yes I did, but neither of them came up in the online Oxford, unlike the awful-sounding "infoglut", which did. – BillJ Feb 18 '16 at 20:45
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    It makes me think of that hilarious episode of Blackadder where Edmund tells Samuel Johnson that he's omitted the words "pericombobulation" and "contrafibularities" from his famous dictionary. "But they're common words down my way", he goes on to say, much to Johnson's annoyance. – BillJ Feb 18 '16 at 20:56
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    Exactly! Or on this side of the pond, the Simpson's (TV adult cartoon show) made-up word "cromulent" that actually has made it into Webster's New Millenium Dictionary. I didn't know how prolific the Simpson's show was to create new words!! http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Made-up_words – Kristina Lopez Feb 18 '16 at 21:02
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    Another word is infostress. – Grammar Addict Feb 18 '16 at 21:04
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    OMG, the end of civilisation is nigh. A sort of lexical doomsday or Armageddon. – BillJ Feb 18 '16 at 21:10
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    English speakers are lucky, Russian has the real lexical doomsday, or is it Lexigeddon? :-) They continuously adopt English words, one can't even tell if some word is real one or not any more. – Grammar Addict Feb 18 '16 at 21:12
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    I think I'm losing the will to live. – BillJ Feb 18 '16 at 21:14
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    The only noble way to go is self-infolation. :-) – Kristina Lopez Feb 18 '16 at 21:22
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    Infoglut of infotrash causes infostress and infoxication. – Grammar Addict Feb 18 '16 at 22:46
  • @BillJ: What eez ziss about ze Franjch? Eet eez becuz of ze gendarme de grammair. Eef you speak a bon mot wis anuzzer languajh, zay vill arrrrrrest you, tout de suite. Oh ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho. Butt uv corse. – rhetorician Feb 23 '16 at 23:35
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You are inundated with information.

inundate:

  • overwhelm (someone) with things or people to be dealt with.
    • "we've been inundated with complaints from listeners"
    • synonyms: overwhelm, overrun, overload, bog down, swamp, besiege, snow under, bombard, glut
  • flood
    • "the islands may be the first to be inundated as sea levels rise"
    • synonyms: flood, deluge, overrun, swamp, drown, submerge, engulf
Kevin Workman
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I think the phrase "paralysis by analysis" encapsulates the feeling of being overwhelmed by an abundance of information.

Wikipedia has a thorough explanation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis

Michael.
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    That's not terrible, but I think that applies more to thinking too much, rather than being provided too much information. This can happen if two choices are simply too similar. – DCShannon Feb 19 '16 at 17:06
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    Not only is it not terrible, but I think it's rather good. But I have to agree with @DCShannon; it's not an answer to the question asked. It's about being incapable of deciding what to do based on over-thinking the information available, not (necessarily) having too much information. I'm not going to downvote it because it's tangentially relevant, but can't upvote it either. – Alan K Feb 19 '16 at 18:48
  • I think "overwhelmed" is the right word. – Tony Ennis Feb 21 '16 at 13:57
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'snowed under' is associated with helplessness; and appropriately, the 'snow' has become a simple bulk instead of many individually unique snowflakes.

Simon Ashby
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  • "Snowed under" typically connotes having so much work to do that you can't cope. I guess you could be snowed under with information, but by itself it doesn't connote having too much data at your disposal. – Nuclear Hoagie Feb 28 '24 at 17:41
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Infobesity or infoxication are great choices. Based on "infoflation" (inflation of information), I sometimes feel infoflated. The neologism infoflation is associated to an unpublished paper, part of a lecture at LSE, by Sophia Kaitatzi-Whitlock, 2008, Web 2.0 Interactive: the rise of popular agency and its impact.

Laurent Duval
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Consider,

infobog

One is the "Infobog," where people are so overwhelmed by information and e-mail messages that they lose their productivity. Times - UNT Digital Library

data slam

Meaningless pieces of data which can clog corporate intranet sites and databases. They make systems slow, unwieldy and difficult to navigate. In the process, they slow down decision making. Larapedia

infowhelm

The exponential growth of information Wiki

Elian
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You seem to be asking about a way to describe not just being overloaded with information, but being unable to find the valuable or interesting information you want due to the vast amount of unrelated, low quality, or downright misleading material in your way. You're also asking not just for a single word, but also a "phrase" according to your tag. Therefore, I offer:

separating the wheat from the chaff

There's so much garbage on the internet these days that it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff when you search for medical information.

also: gold among the dross

It's hard to find the gold among the dross on the internet these days - there are just so many false stories.

If the information you're looking for is some sort of singular fact, you can use the phrase "finding a needle in a haystack" to indicate the difficulty of the search for a single item among a vast array of similar things. However, you generally would not use this phrase to describe searching for a set or group of things, or a class of information.

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Mark Thompson
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How about bamboozled? Or, disempowered.

It often feels that the rising tide of information around us serves primarily to disempower and bamboozle us into passive acquiescence.

Disempower - to divest or deprive of power conferred.

Bamboozle - to deceive by trickery, hoax, cozen, impose upon (OED).

Dan
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    I dunno - do you really think there's some major conspiracy to purposely overload us with information for some nefarious reason? – Kristina Lopez Feb 18 '16 at 23:14
  • @KristinaLopez - No I suppose not... (although too much poorly catalogued, unprocessed, contradictory information can certainly make it difficult to think straight). – Dan Feb 19 '16 at 00:59
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Most simply, you are buried in information.

Chris Johnson
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The acronym DRIP comes to mind. It stands for Data Rich, Information Poor and means that you have a ton of data but no understanding of what it all means.

Kevin
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TILT, a la the pinball machine lockout mode .

K7AAY
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This condition of "information oversaturation causing [a] feeling of fatigue" pre-dates the World Wide Web. A student in a Far Side cartoon felt like this. So he said, "My brain is full."

Jasper
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The acronym tmi comes to mind. It is in common usage, meaning "too much information." Common in chat.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=TMI

mtebob
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Decision fatigue would be the term describing the state of mind after too much information. A state of mind constantly produced and abused by the mass media.

Thomas
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    Surely decision fatigue is fatigue caused by making too many decisions? – AndyT Feb 19 '16 at 17:06
  • No, it is a state of mind, in which it likes to take short cuts to come to a decision instead of investigating the whole topic. The fatigue which leads to this is caused by too much information without processing it properly. – Thomas Feb 29 '16 at 18:44