While reading this blog post at copyblogger, I got this thought in my head. What does information overload do to our fear and anxiety?
Fear can induce your self-defense mechanism; you close off your mind, brace yourself for impact, and prepare to lash out if need be. Prolonged fear can feed into the anxiety loop and cause serious damage to your psyche, your health. But what I would like to know is which do we deal with more often whilst hopping around the webosphere? Fear or anxiety?
I found interesting evidence pointing to anxiety in the article, The Effect of Web Assisted Learning on Student’s Anxiety, written by Michael Macaulay in the Journal of Educational Computing Research
The subjective anxiety levels of two groups of 30 postgraduate students were recorded immediately before and after using either the Web or a non-Web-based medium for studying. The group that used the Web recorded significantly higher anxiety levels than those who did not.
Very interesting, I think I’ll be more mindful of when I get overwhelmed by stress. Share your thoughts. This is a BIG DEAL considering so much of our academic and social lives has already moved to cyberland.
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"Fear is our essential lack of belief in our ability to handle whatever comes our way. Full of wonderful anecdotes and heart-felt stories, Jacqueline Wales beautifully illustrates how to start managing your fears so you can live your life the way you want it to be."
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Jacqueline, I never really thought about this until I read this post. There’s so much information out on the web and a lot of conflicting messages. I can certainly understand how it can raise anxiety levels. I recently did some research online and found so many different and conflicting “expert” viewpoints that I felt more frustrated than I did before the research.
Thank you for posting this. Amy
Amy, it seems like the internet is a force of nature in its own right. The more it grows and swells perhaps the more difficult it is to harness for a unified purpose such as research.
Google scholar is a good tool to use for literature research, but even then it’s easy to see how many academic conflicts of interest there are.
Random, but I love their quote, “stand on the shoulders of giants.”
Take care.