Overfeeding on Information

By ALEX WILLIAMS
YANA COLLINS LEHMAN, a film production accountant who lives in Brooklyn, knew something was amiss when her 5-year-old son, Beckett, started to announce to no one in particular, “I’m John McCain, and I approved this statement.”

But it is hard not to, she said, with the financial markets in meltdown, and that crisis increasingly intertwined with a frenzied presidential campaign entering the homestretch. This is why her own news diet has spiked to where it feels as if it’s taking over her life. And maybe her son’s, too.

“It’s such a drain on productivity,” Ms. Collins Lehman said. “It’s a compulsion.”

For many, the hunger for information is reminiscent of those harried, harrowing months after Sept. 11, 2001. But seven years ago, there was no iPhone, no Twitter, no YouTube. There was no Google Reader to endlessly feed people updates on their favorite Web sites. Social networking sites, blogs and TiVo were in their infancy.

This explosion of information technology, when combined with an unusual confluence of dramatic — and ongoing — news events, has led many people to conclude that they have given their lives over to a news obsession. They find themselves taking breaks at work every 15 minutes to check the latest updates, and at the end of the day, taking laptops to bed. Then they pad through darkened homes in the predawn to check on the Asian markets.

Despite having a job that obliges her to keep up with the latest movies, Ms. Collins Lehman recently downgraded her Netflix subscription to two movies a month, she said, because she was spending so much time following the news.

Raymond L. Roker, 40, who runs a music magazine called Urb and lives in Los Angeles, said that his media diet has swollen to nearly unmanageable proportions because of the turbulent current events. He sets his DVR to record more than 10 daily political shows, which can take four to five hours to sit through every night, and posts about politics continuously on his personal blog (he also blogs occasionally for The Huffington Post).

In addition, Mr. Roker said, he spends much of his remaining free time swapping political views with friends on Facebook. “And meanwhile, I should be running my mini media empire,” he said in an e-mail message. “If that’s not addiction, I don’t know what is.”

Mary Beth Caschetta, 42, an advertising copywriter who lives in Provincetown, Mass., said she has been so concerned about the direction of the country that she has been taking her Kindle to bed so she can track the headlines. In recent weeks, Ms. Caschetta said, the news has even invaded her dreams. A recent one had her grilling the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, about the economy over cocktails, she said.

“It’s just the last thing I think of every night before I go to sleep,” Ms. Caschetta said, referring to the news.

This spike in news interest is reflected in Web traffic figures from Yahoo’s political and financial news sites, according to the company. “Both sites are experiencing record traffic over the last few weeks,” said Brian Nelson, a Yahoo spokesman. “Finance has been operating at near capacity.”

Traffic on the financial channel jumped by 27 percent during the week of Sept. 15, when Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch imploded as the simmering crisis boiled over, company figures showed.

ERIC KLINENBERG, a sociology professor at New York University, said people are unusually transfixed by news of the day because the economic crisis in particular seems to reach into every corner of their lives. Usually, he added, people can compartmentalize their lives into different spheres of activity, such as work, family and leisure. But now, “those spheres are collapsing into each other.”

And the news is not just consequential, but whipsaw-volatile. Financial markets swing hundreds of points within an hour; poll numbers shift. This means that news these days has an unbelievably short shelf life, news addicts said. If you haven’t checked the headlines in the last half-hour, the world may already have changed.

Jeff Slate, a songwriter who lives in Manhattan, said that he has found himself logging on to the Internet in the middle of the night to check the Asian financial markets, something he had not done for years. And a quick scan of the headlines usually leads him down an information rabbit hole, since almost every blog or news article links to a half-dozen others, which link to others. Even music blogs these days are filled with links to political news and commentary.

“There’s just been a glut of information that even four years ago that wasn’t the case,” said Mr. Slate, 41. In times when people think their fate is tied to enormous events that are out of their hands, stockpiling information can give some people a sense of control, social scientists said.

For others, information serves as social currency. Crises, like soap operas or sports teams, can provide a serial drama for people to talk about and bond over, said Kenneth J. Gergen, a senior research psychologist at Swarthmore College who studies technology and culture. “It gives us the stuff that keeps the community together,” he said. And for those whose social circles think of knowledge as power, having the latest information can also enhance status, Dr. Gergen said. “If you can just say what somebody said yesterday, that doesn’t do the trick,” he said.

Indeed, Michael Palka, who lives in Manhattan and is the president of SheFinds.com, an Internet fashion publishing company founded by his wife, Michelle Madhok, said that he feels a sense of “one-upmanship” among those in his social circle to know the latest details about, say, credit default swaps and how they may affect the election. An Obama supporter, he said, he uses any means at his disposal to stay ahead of the curve. He downloaded an application onto his iPhone to feed him up-to-the-minute polling data; during presidential debates, he and his wife sit around at home, using Twitter to exchange political updates with friends.

“The more you know about what’s going on,” Mr. Palka said, “the better case you can make for your candidate.”

To combat the sense of information overload, some find it tempting to pull back. Michael Davidson, the founder of Citypl.com, an expedited delivery service, who lives in Potomac, Md., said he and his wife attended a recent dinner party with three other couples where “each individual sat wringing their hands and telling in their own way how they can’t keep up anymore with all of the news and current events,” he said in an e-mail message. Mr. Davidson, 57, argued that the Rip Van Winkle approach was still the best.

That Washington Irving tale, he said he explained to them, concerns a man who went to sleep under a tree for 20 years, only to wake up and find that on the surface everything had changed, but on another level, nothing had.