Forgetting How to Forget: How Our Tech Creates Constant Consciousness and Information Overload

It happened to me again: In my seemingly productive day, I found myself slouched over my phone, eyes glazed and head hanging off my neck like a bowling ball as I feverishly scrolled through my Facebook wall. Mile after mile, inches at a time, I absorbed the most benign yet captivating photos of friend’s dogs, neighbors’ lunches and life events of people I haven’t seen in years. It wasn’t just Facebook; I plowed through my Twitter and Instagram feeds, refreshed my inbox multiple times, and took a quick hit of the weather app before I finally resurfaced in a daze. All told, I burned a solid half-hour of my day mindlessly lost in my phone. Sound familiar?

As our tech becomes more and more compatible with our daily lives, it’s no stretch to admit that we’ve all found ourselves stuck in the media-consumption blackhole at some point. At any given time, we can access unending streams of information. Email, social media, 24-hour news outlets; the options are endless. And the consequences are pervasive.

A quick google search will reveal multiple studies showing the effects of media and technology consumption on our mental health, productivity in the workplace, and overall way of life. Sure, there are plenty of benefits to having this cutting-edge tech in our palms and pockets. But as our tech becomes more powerful, more optimized with faster processors and infinite data storage capabilities, we fall behind in our tactics to wield this technology. Study after study shows that Facebook usage has a direct correlation with depression and anxiety. Applications designed to increase efficiency in the workplace – like Slack – may actually harm productivity and distract us more than ever. Amidst the technology that is meant to make our lives easier and more enjoyable, it seems that society suffers more than ever from a general, unexplainable anxiety.

The age of Constant Consciousness has arrived.

Constant Consciousness is the unceasing awareness of what’s happening outside of one’s immediate surroundings, a state incubated by our technology’s connectivity to the world. To put another way, it’s like having a feeding tube directly from the internet. This consciousness has not only hindered our ability to be present in our own lives, but has also eroded our unconscious ability to forget nonessential information. Rather, we amass copious bits of data in the form of photos, videos, podcasts, texts, events and many others, carrying them from each day to the next, crushed by information overload.

Take Facebook and the other typical culprits, for example. Immediately upon logging in, Facebook users are bombarded with infinite posts from other users, groups and advertisers. These posts contain everything from marriage announcements, spring break photos, career kickoffs, birthdays, etc. For the typical user who follows hundreds or even thousands of other users, the information stream is overwhelming. At any given time, we have a general idea of what Shelly from sophomore year is up to. We know what that manager that we used to work for is doing on vacation. We know what food was served at the rotary meeting last Thursday. And on and on. Through these intermittent updates from all of these users, we know more about people who live in different states, people we haven’t seen in years or maybe have never even met in person than we do about those in our immediate social circles. All of our social media platforms spoon-feed us with information from people who, in the time before this tech, would have been forgotten long ago (from which we would be completely unscathed).

Our Constant Consciousness is not only rooted in the present, it’s also rooted in the past. With inventions like iCloud and Google Drive, we have the ability to save thousands of photos and videos on our phones, stretching back years and decades. It may sound nostalgic to have instant and immediate access to that photo from your cousin Susie’s wedding, but is it necessary to have it at all times? With each photo saved on our phone is a tiny memory, looking for a foothold in our consciousness. In the past, people would take photos, develop them, and put them in a shoe box on the shelf, in a sense unloading the information until some time in the future. Now that technology allows us to carry all of these photos in our pockets, we can submerge ourselves again and again into all the little memories from the past, carrying them around with us throughout our daily lives.

The general, unexplainable anxiety that results from Constant Consciousness is due to the inherent comparisons that arise from a globalized internet landscape. Our tech gives us the tools to constantly critique and size ourselves up compared to others online. While we feint excitement and hit the Like button, deep down we think Now why couldn’t I get a promotion at work; why can’t I take a vacation; why can’t I look that good in a bikini. We are constantly conscious of our deficiencies, whether real or perceived. Worse, we may even distort and inflate the lives of others’ to seem much better than they actually are, which in turn makes us feel even more flawed. Even in comparing the past to the present, we may dig through that iCloud for that photo from 2014 when our lives were seemingly better than they are now. Instead of focusing on positive, productive opportunities in life before us, we dwell on the memories of the past, the ghosts of which sit tidily inside our iPhones.

I am envious a little of the simplicity that must have existed in the world before smart phones. To know what was happening in the world, we had to wait for the evening news. To know what our neighbor did on vacation, we had to call them on the telephone and ask. To know about anything, we had put forth at least some effort, which would require us to prioritize what information we would put our energy into pursuing. Thus, I believe, we would only carry the information that would be immediate and pertinent to our lives. Our bandwidth would be spent on our passions and interests, not crowded out by the photos from your coworker’s latest Facebook post.

Obviously our technology has done much good for the world. Across the board, nearly all industries have seen new horizons because of the power of our contemporary tech. But as the latest iPhone is revealed, cloud-based servers grow to gargantuan sizes and applications like Facebook roll out dating features, we have to strive to unplug, to disengage. To get in touch with the reality offline. Because at the end of the day, just because our technology can process infinite amounts of data, we as a humans cannot.

Which just might be a good thing.