In our work at the Virtual Happiness Institute we believe that we’ve found what makes people unhappy online. It’s not information overload. Information overload simply doesn’t exist. But there is something that we call the Sushi Syndrom. The tendency to eat it all, when you should really be picking one or two? Let me explain this by the way we look at email.

From mail to email
When you entered the job market, mail was fysical. It came in, once or twice a day. And it came in small packages or in envelopes. When the pile on your desk became too high, you hired an assistant. Or you welcomed a new colleague.

Nowadays, mail is digital. You simply can’t see that the pile is getting bigger and bigger. And there’s no way on earth that you will get an asssistant. If you’re lucky you’ll get an out –of-office assistant when you go on holiday.
But because you think that you should nail each and every email, that you should log every blog or that you feel that you need to read every tweet, that’s what makes you perceive an information overload.

You all have been to a sushi bar right? You have a seat and you see all those gorgeous little sushi rolls pass you by. And once in a while you pick one and enjoy it to the fullest. You don’t enter the bar and start eating everything on the menu. And if you did, you would become sick and definitely would experience sushi overload.

Filters
The solution as you may all know, lies in the use of filters. We don’t need another Facebook, Twitter of Foursquare. We need to use those tools properly. We need digital curators, we need virtual boyscouts and we need a network to guide us.

Education
We’re now in the unique situation that children in classrooms today have access to more information than their teachers do. Yet, these teachers are educating them the way we were taught to use the phonebook. It’s fysical thinking, which means it’s linear and it’s based on an hierarchiy of authority. Where it should be digital thinking, wich makes it asyncronic and based on a network of reputations.

I’m advocating for a digital media literacy that has the same importance as proper diet education.