It is my great pleasure to be part of this 24th International Conference on Great Literature and to talk about information fatigue syndrome and digital burnout. Is there anyone among us today that did not experience that nagging feeling of having too little time and too much information to deal with?

Do you sometimes feel mental exhaustion from being exposed to too much information? You overly multitask, but the concentration and memory fade while the irritability grows. Your feeling of helplessness grows too, together with the relationship problems with your colleagues

and with your loved ones at home. Welcome to digital burnout, welcome to information fatigue syndrome, where the overwhelming amount of great literature plays a significant role. We believe that information fatigue is a new phenomenon, something so generous to the 21st century.

However, around 2000 years ago, the Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger complained that his peers were wasting their time and money accumulating too many books,

admonishing the abundance of books is a distraction. Seneca recommended focusing on fewer, but better books and reading them thoroughly and repeatedly. After Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 15th century, the plethora of information produced, shared and disseminated

so widely was thought to be very distracting and counterproductive. The introduction of personal computers and especially the creation of the World Wide Web dramatically increased the amount of information easily available to all of us.

Today, it is well established and confirmed many times that information overload and digital overstimulation cause digital burnout, a situation where physical and mental exhaustion is caused by spending too much time in front of screens. Stress induced by attempts to assimilate excessive amounts of information from the media,

particularly from social media and the internet or work, makes us ill by interfering with our sleep, sabotaging our concentration and memory and undermining our immune system and overall well-being.

Information fatigue syndrome is defined as weariness of overwhelming feeling of being faced with an indigestible and incomprehensible amount of information. If we look at the term information fatigue syndrome, also known as information overload or information intoxication,

we come across David Lewis, a British psychologist who lived from 1941 to 2001. He is given credit for being the one who coined and first used the term. He said that having too much information can be as dangerous as having too little. Among other problems, it can lead to paralysis of analysis,

making it far harder to find the right solutions or make the best decisions. In his report, diabolically entitled Dying for Information, Lewis said in 1996 that an excess of information is strangling many businesses

and causing mental anguish and even physical illness in managers at all levels. According to him, the problem was expected to worsen and we are all witnesses to correctness of that prediction. His conclusion came from Reuter's survey of 1,300 business people in Britain,

the US, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia that included junior, middle and senior managers in a variety of industry sectors. Two-thirds of those interviewed indicated that stress attributed to dealing with too much information had damaged their personal relationships,

increased tension with colleagues at work and contributed to decline in job satisfaction. More than 40% felt that important decisions were delayed and the ability to make choices was hampered by excess information. The cost of collecting the surplus data exceeded its value.

One-third said that they suffered from health problems as a direct consequence of stress related to information overload. Let's look at the grey literature and the role it plays as a part of information fatigue syndrome. It is believed that the grey literature overload is a major part

of information overload and cause of information fatigue syndrome. There are two major factors that make grey literature the main contributor of our information fatigue syndrome. There are extensive variety of grey literature document types and extremely high amount the quantity of grey literature output.

Also, grey literature is highly contextual and often software dependent so it is hard to collect and process and even harder to make sense of and preserve for future use. Examples are social media, news items, email reports and data.

To illustrate this huge number of grey literature types we can look at the grey net website. It lists over 150 document types including databases, data sets, data sheets, data papers, satellite data, census data, product data,

just to mention some of the data types. So what are the major symptoms, the visible and observable, behavioral and other changes characteristic of someone who suffered from information including the grey literature syndrome? They are apathy, indifference, mental exhaustion,

rising from exposure to too much information, poor concentration, short-term memory failure, overly multitasking resulting in incomplete tasks, overstimulation causing headache and nausea, tension, relationship problems at home, occasional irritability,

frequent feelings of helplessness and compulsive need to be connected to the internet. As a great novelist and poet Gertrude Steen put it so nicely, everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

Having established the starting ground for information and grey literature fatigue syndrome, let's look now at its main causes. Since we live in a different world today called the digital world, its main attributes make the basis for a digital burnout.

As of January 2022, the total world population was 7.91 billion. 57% lives in urban areas. Over 67% of the total population or 5.3 billion use a mobile phone. 4.95 billion people which is well over 60% of the population are internet users.

Almost all the people connected to the internet are also active social media users. Regarding this slide on the overview of internet use, let's concentrate just on the two last figures.

Average daily time spent using the internet by each internet user is almost 7 hours. It is an astonishingly high number of hours spent which should make us all think hard about its usefulness and reasons to be there. For all of us who are creating, providing, organizing and making information

and grey literature available on the internet, the figure that 92.1% of users access the information through their mobile phones should be of utmost importance. Previous reality of PCs playing the major role is not valid anymore. It has dramatically changed towards mobile devices.

We need to direct our efforts towards this new tool and adjust our internet and web presence consequently. This table of top internet uses shows that the majority of people are searching for information, using it for communication as well as for entertainment.

I personally find it very encouraging that there is a high percentage of use being geared towards education and study. So how much time do we spend on social media apps? Statistics show that we spend monthly on average, almost 24 hours on YouTube, 20 hours on TikTok and the same on Facebook.

Another 19 hours are spent monthly on WhatsApp, the most popular communications app. Generally speaking, an average social media user spends between 80 to 90 hours monthly on various social media apps.

Translated into weekly work hours, we spend over two work weeks browsing various social media or reading messages received. So let me repeat this again. In average, every single one of us spends almost half of his or her productive work hours on social media,

blindly devouring content that is at best questionable. Let's have a quick look at the YouTube statistics in 2022. There are 2.6 billion YouTube users. Viewers watch over 1 billion hours of video every day, localized in over 100 countries and 80 languages.

63% watch time comes from mobile. 400 hours of video uploaded every single minute. The most popular video platform today. The amount of data available around the world in 2020 was estimated at 59 zettabytes.

It is predicted that it will reach mind-boggling 175 zettabytes by 2025. 1 zettabyte is equivalent to 1 trillion gigabytes.

If each bit is a coin around 3mm thick, 1 zettabyte made up of a stack of coins would be 2550 light years. This can get you to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, 600 times. Or 1 zettabyte is equivalent to 36,000 years worth of HD quality video.

In a work environment, quantity of emails received and sent represent probably the main contributor and cause of information fatigue syndrome. It was estimated that there are 4.3 billion email users around the world.

There is also an evident trend of constant growth of email users around. Over 333 billion emails are sent daily. If we talk about journals, in 2009 we passed the 50 million mark

of the total number of science papers published since 1665. Approximately 2.5 million new scientific papers are published each year. As of 2014, there were approximately 28,100 active, scholarly peer-reviewed journals.

This excludes the increasing number of predatory or fake scientific journals which produce high volumes of poor quality research. Regarding books, it is estimated there are between 500,000 and 1 million books published annually. With self-published authors, there are close to 4 million new book titles published each year.

The typical self-published author sells about 5 copies of his or her book. The average US book now sells less than 200 copies per year and less than 1,000 copies over its lifetime. According to Google, there have been 130 million books published

since the invention of Gutenberg's printing press in 1440. However, this does not factor in books published after 2010, nor does it include self-published book titles. In 2021, 826 million books were sold. An interesting fact is that in the US, 75% of people surveyed

prefer print to ebooks or audiobooks. Let's return to Seneca and remind ourselves that it does not matter how many books you have, but how good are the books which you have.

We need to ask ourselves if there is a solution to the grey literature fatigue syndrome. The solution to grey literature syndrome is not simple and is not straightforward. Some main actions to deal with it are the following. Filter all the information that comes to your way and make sure

that you don't contribute to digital burnout of others by spreading and sharing unnecessary information. Sharpen your focus when looking for and using grey literature and, in fact, any other information. Focus on essential, not on interesting.

Prioritize. Pick reliable and trustworthy sources of grey literature. Delegate. Ask for help. Learn to say no. Shut down disrupting devices. Separate business from private time. Relax. Go for walks.

Meditate. There is also a role that grey literature information specialists could play. They can help us filter information, maintain lists of high impact resources, prioritize readings and research materials, do preliminary research, determine reliable and trustworthy sources,

offer learning and research hubs, provide opportunities to experience modern IT environments, offer information and knowledge management training, encourage exploration, creation and collaboration, provide no stress and quiet spaces, become pillars of open access and open science.

And finally, the solution for grey literature fatigue syndrome is a huge waste paper basket because information is not knowledge. Albert Einstein. Thank you.