Infobese adjective

BRAVE NEW WORDS

infobesity

noun [uncountable]

the condition of continually consuming large amounts of information, especially when this has a negative effect on a person's well-being and ability to concentrate

infobese adjective

'… the digital deluge is affecting everybody, and not in a good way. Our survey … suggests that nearly half of the UK's office workers are suffering from Infobesity, the over-consumption of information. It's making us unhappy, is bad for our health, and hurts our productivity.'

HUFFINGTON POST 17TH JULY 2014

'The dilemmas of an infobese parent … Margarine, or butter? Routine, or demand feed? Have inoculations, or chance it? In a world where everything you could ever wish to know is literally at your fingertips, are we paralysed by knowing too much.'

AQUARIUS MAGAZINE 10TH SEPTEMBER 2012

Too much information. No, not a personal revelation causing embarrassment to the listener, but a 21st century malaise with a brand new moniker. If you're a constant consumer of the relentless feast of information which is available in the digital era, then you could be an unsuspecting sufferer of a condition described as infobesity.

Infobesity appears to be an epidemic. It's practically impossible to be a web user without succumbing to occasional … bouts of randomly looking at things which serve no significant purpose

We live in a world in which information is king, and the days of waiting to receive it or leaving the house to find it are long gone. Whether at home, work or on the move, anything we might conceivably wish to know is right there, just a few key presses or mouse-clicks away. The Internet offers a never-ending onslaught of facts, figures, images and info ad nauseam, which, it's been observed, we have a tendency to indiscriminately digest without hesitation. But the problem is that, just like eating one too many doughnuts, gorging ourselves silly on all of this stuff is not always a good idea. It can make us sluggish, indecisive and unable to concentrate on the task at hand. This is a state of affairs that's informally been dubbed infobesity – the tendency to crave and digest information even when this isn't always necessary or effective for our needs.

Perhaps even more disturbingly, infobesity appears to be an epidemic. It's practically impossible to be a web user without succumbing to occasional, if not frequent, bouts of randomly looking at things which serve no significant purpose for you, and thereby wasting time and effort which might have been better spent in other ways (guilty as charged!). These days, it seems, it's all too easy to become infobese, with many of us falling prey to a 'junk food' diet of non-essential and sometimes low-quality information.

Background – infobesity

The creative coinage infobesity is a blend based on the words information and obesity (the condition of being overweight in a way which is unhealthy). The noun obesity dates back to the early 17th century, and is based on the Latin form obesus meaning 'having eaten until fat'. The related adjective obese came along about 40 years later, via a process technically known as back-formation (where a shorter word is formed from a longer word which already exists in a language). Mirroring this pattern, infobese is used as a counterpart adjective to infobesity.

The term infobesity draws a parallel between excessive consumption of information and the negative consequences of unhealthy western diets. Another blend following the same principle is globesity – a combination of global and obesity, characterizing the developed world's widespread problem of being dangerously overweight.

Back on the theme of information, rather than food, consumption, in business circles there's also been a buzz recently surrounding a phenomenon known as content shock. On the basis that the human capacityto absorb information isn't completely limitless, this expression describes the situation of people reaching saturation point – a scenario with potentially serious consequences for so-called content marketing (marketing strategies which acquire customers through the creation and sharing of published content).

wilfing

noun [uncountable]

the activity of browsing the Internet without any particular purpose

wilf verb [intransitive]

wilfer noun [countable]

'… almost a quarter of the country's internet users spend 30% or more of their internet time wilfing – that's the equivalent to spending an entire working day every fortnight browsing the net aimlessly.

'Pete Cohen, life coach and TV personality said: "Not allowing ourselves to wilf takes a mixture of planning and willpower."'

CHANNEL 4 NEWS, UK 12TH APRIL 2007

'This new breed of users are called wilfers. They surf the web without any real purpose, often forgetting what they were there for in the first place.'

BIZREPORT 11TH APRIL 2007

Are you surfing away many precious days of your life by randomly browsing the web? If so, then you count among the millions of Internet users worldwide who seem to be addicted to the newly identified habit of wilfing.

A recent survey of 2,400 Internet users commissioned by UK financial website moneysupermarket.com found that more than a quarter of respondents admitted to habitually wilfing – being drawn into websites that they hadn't originally intended to look at.

Background – wilfing

We might go online with a specific purpose in mind but the potential choices and distractions are so many and varied that they cause us to lose track of what we were looking for

The term, coined by survey author YouGov plc, an Internet-based market research firm, is derived from a rough acronym of the phrase 'What wasI lookingfor?'. It has already spawned a related intransitive verb, to wilf, and those of us who regularly indulge in the practice are also correspondingly referred to as wilfers. The theory is that, even though we might go online with a specific purpose in mind, the potential choices and distractions are so many and varied that they cause us to lose track of what we were looking for. Shopping, travel and news websites are allegedly among the most likely to cause people to wilf.

Research reveals that wilfing typically occupies us for the equivalent of two whole days every calendar month. It also shows that men are more likely to admit to being wilfers than women, and that Internet users under the age of 25 are three times more likely to wilf than those over 55. Unsurprisingly, a lot of wilfing takes place at work, contributing significantly to the problem of cyberslacking, which was in the British news again recently because of concerns about the use of social-networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace during office hours.

As well as its time-wasting influences, wilfing can have other destructive consequences: a third of the men questioned in the survey admitted that their tendency to wilf had had a damaging effect on their relationship with a partner. It's even possible that some regular surfers are suffering from Internet Addiction Disorder or IAD.

The cure for wilfing is straightforward in principle: adopt a specific surfing goal and set yourself a time limit. In practice, it's much more difficult: a matter of willpower and the determination to resist a potentially infinite pile of distractions. Let me just hastily add at this point though that, if you regularly enjoy reading BuzzWord, then that doesn't count as wilfing – you did '(know) what you were looking for'! And if you stumbled upon this page by accident? Go on, have a read, you've nothing better to do!

cyberslacking also cyberloafing

noun [uncountable]

using a company's Internet connection during working hours for activities which are not work-related, such as shopping, playing games and sending personal e-mails

cyberslacker or cyberloafer noun [countable]

cyberslack or cyberloaf verb [intransitive]

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Хронологія подій Болонського процесу... 5	\|	Cyberslacking adjective

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