Can Digital Disgust Transcend Information Overload?
May 5, 2025
Our society has become awash in information. Though much of it is useless, many of us have trouble disengaging even when we want to. The temptation of instant distraction is too strong, and its instruments are always at hand. Perhaps the secret lies in “Developing Digital Disgust.”
Blogger Christopher Butler has a risqué but apt comparison for this moment in our culture: He asserts information is to wisdom as pornography is to real intimacy. Porn, he writes, portrays physical connection but creates emotional distance. Information overload is similar: When we are bombarded by data, each piece of knowledge loses meaning. Butler observes:
“When we feel overwhelmed by information — anxious and unable to process what we’ve already taken in — we’re realizing that ‘more’ doesn’t help us find truth. But because we have also established information as a fundamental good in our society, failure to keep up with it, make sense of it, and even profit from it feels like a personal moral failure. There is only one way out of that. We don’t need another filter. We need a different emotional response to information. We should not only question why our accepted spectrum of emotional response to information — in the general sense — is mostly limited to the space between curiosity and desire, but actively develop a capacity for disgust when it becomes too much. And it has become too much. Some people may say that we just need better information skills and tools, not less information. But this misses how fundamentally our minds need space and time to turn information into understanding. When every moment is filled with new inputs, we can’t fully absorb, process, and reflect upon what we’ve consumed. Reflection, not consumptions, creates wisdom. Reflection requires quiet, isolation, and inactivity.”
Yes. And also boredom is said to be the “gateway to creativity.” So why not dump the smartphone, stop streaming, and read books? Maybe even talk to people IRL? As with any addiction, change can be harder than it sounds. Butler suggests a shift in perspective. We must recognize that our attention is now a sort of currency and develop a sense of disgust at companies’ constant efforts to steal it. That disgust may help us put aside our devices and reconnect with the physical world. And ourselves.
Cynthia Murrell, May 5, 2025
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