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?
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)
"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
You are inundated with information.
I think the phrase "paralysis by analysis" encapsulates the feeling of being overwhelmed by an abundance of information.
Wikipedia has a thorough explanation.
'snowed under' is associated with helplessness; and appropriately, the 'snow' has become a simple bulk instead of many individually unique snowflakes.
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 The neologism infoflation is associated to an unpublished paper, part of a lecture at LSE, by Sophia Kaitatzi-Whitlock, 2008, Web 2.0 Interactive: the rise of popular agency and its impact.
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
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.
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).
Most simply, you are buried in information.
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.
TILT, a la the pinball machine lockout mode .
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."
The acronym tmi comes to mind. It is in common usage, meaning "too much information." Common in chat.
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.
