Day archives: November 20th, 2020

3 reasons for information exhaustion – and what to do about it

An endless flow of information is coming at us constantly: It might be an article a friend shared on Facebook with a sensational headline or wrong information about the spread of the coronavirus. All this information may leave many of us feeling as though we have no energy to engage. As a philosopher who studies knowledge-sharing practices, Mark Satta calls this experience “epistemic exhaustion.” The term “epistemic” comes from the Greek word episteme, often translated as “knowledge.” So epistemic exhaustion is more of a knowledge-related exhaustion. It is not knowledge itself that tires out many of us. Rather, it is the process of trying to gain or share knowledge under challenging circumstances. Currently, there are at least three common sources that, from Satta’s perspective, are leading to such exhaustion. But there are also ways to deal with them.

Subjects: Ethics, KM, Social Media