Infomaniacs: content or relationship?
Are you interested in the content of an idea... or its relationship to other ideas?
The previous post was on how exhausting it can be exploring the plethora of ideas in our world. It is really the compulsion or addiction to knowing MORE ideas. It's been called info-lust... and so many of us have become 'infomaniacs'!
The infomaniac is driven to know more, find out more. Infomaniacs fret and worry that they are missing out if they don't know about something. Hint at a secret and you have them salivating. Would "The Secret" book and DVD have been so phenomenally successful had it been called something generic and bland like "The Way To Success"?
No! It's the idea of 'the secret' that overrides our scepticism and drives us to find out if there really is a secret that we don't know about. We can't afford NOT to know. So we buy into it.
I suddenly realised that my own infomaniac tendencies were less driven by knowing the specific content of ideas than by the relationships and connections that can be seen or formed between all these different ideas. Sure some ideas are like juicy bones and, doglike, I want to chew on them and suck out every last drop of the marrow. But I'm more excited by knowing the connections between ideas. I like seeing the big picture patterns that emerge when you 'join the dots' between ideas.
What about you? What kind of infomaniac are you? Are you all about the content of ideas or the way they connect?
The previous post was on how exhausting it can be exploring the plethora of ideas in our world. It is really the compulsion or addiction to knowing MORE ideas. It's been called info-lust... and so many of us have become 'infomaniacs'!
The infomaniac is driven to know more, find out more. Infomaniacs fret and worry that they are missing out if they don't know about something. Hint at a secret and you have them salivating. Would "The Secret" book and DVD have been so phenomenally successful had it been called something generic and bland like "The Way To Success"?
No! It's the idea of 'the secret' that overrides our scepticism and drives us to find out if there really is a secret that we don't know about. We can't afford NOT to know. So we buy into it.
I suddenly realised that my own infomaniac tendencies were less driven by knowing the specific content of ideas than by the relationships and connections that can be seen or formed between all these different ideas. Sure some ideas are like juicy bones and, doglike, I want to chew on them and suck out every last drop of the marrow. But I'm more excited by knowing the connections between ideas. I like seeing the big picture patterns that emerge when you 'join the dots' between ideas.
What about you? What kind of infomaniac are you? Are you all about the content of ideas or the way they connect?
Labels: connections, ideas, infomaniac
