The Troubling Rise of INFOMO

We're... Kinda Doomed

Though I have seen this as an increasing trend over time, recently, there has been a rise in a certain kind of request for information. This kind of request is usually an innocent question, a request for more details, for alternatives, for the who-what-when-wheres of a situation. Superficially, these are mild queries, but they hint at an incurious spirit overtaking many communities. As a phone-attached millennial, I’m part of several online communities. I have a second life on social media, and these kinds of questions run rampant. But it’s not something merely relegated to the internet. Ever since the beginning of COVID, I’ve seen this behavior run rampant in the classroom. We’ve seen the essays about students who can’t read books anymore, and I know I and other educators have complained to each other about students’ inability to examine course syllabi.

There is something going on here. I’m not sure what, but maybe I can describe the phenomenon. Right now, I’m calling this INFOMO, a portmanteau of information and FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). To me, infomo is the kind of question which is easily answered by either minimal common sense thinking or by a quick google search. For example, on TikTok, a user shared a recipe for a bean soup. Another user commented, “What if I don’t like beans?” What’s the answer here? The answer is don’t make the soup. The answer is to find a different recipe. The original creator was perplexed. How was she to answer a question that calls into question the fundamental ingredient of a recipe? But there have always been these people. On Reddit, there is an entire subreddit called r/IDidntHaveEggs, which posts comments and reviews from recipes in which users have mentioned their very poorly-informed choices of substitutions for recipes and how bad their end results were (one case comes to mind in which someone substituted kale for the carrots in a carrot cake recipe, for example). Sure, maybe folks don’t have the know-how around the kitchen. Cooking is a learned skill which has declined over the years. But this phenomenon isn’t just in the kitchen. Users will ask countless questions about items in the camera frame of a TikTok which could be googled easily. The name of a brand which is clearly shown, what a word means when a user speaks it in a video, background details of some widespread celebrity news… the list goes on.

What ties these together, what makes them infomo, is that those who are asking these questions are attempting to offload the labor of curiosity onto someone else. They are asking to be handed the information without critical thinking, without cross-examination, without rigor. It is another form of anti-intellectualism. It is another coffin-nail in literacy. My job as an educator is to answer questions, to encourage curiosity, to deliver information, but I have found that I’ve had to spend inordinate amounts of time answering emails about assignments and syllabi which already give the desired information. For the course I am currently TA-ing, the syllabus is 25 single-spaced pages long. I cannot tell you how many infomo requests I get which are readily available to these students. It is exhausting. There is a reason why there is such a massive exodus of K-12 teachers in the US. They are tired of being forced into handholding instead of educating. Skills which I depended on being established at the K-12-level, like understanding and respecting deadlines, is now in my purview.

One of the weekly assignments we ask in the course I teach is for students to make critical connections between course materials and then ask a discussion question. They are not tasked with responding to the questions. It is purely an exercise in information synthesis and inquiry. Even with model examples (with a partial script they could copy), students struggled to produce a true question. Sometimes the question was so incurious, it could be googled and answered in less than a minute. This isn’t to single out my students. This is just an example of how much infomo permeates our day-to-day.

I see infomo as exactly what the name suggests: a fear of being left out of the informational loop. Students are so zeroed-in on grades that they miss the material. Users on TikTok want to know what others are joking about at all times. Home cooks don’t want to miss out on any possible recipe trend. There is a fear that someone knows more, knows better, and it’s your fault for not knowing in the first place. But obviously, no one knows everything in the world. I have a PhD in poetry, an affirmation that I know a lot about poems, and I encounter new forms and new poets every day. But for those with infomo, information has accrued a certain amount of currency, and one which others are obligated to share at the drop of a hat. Even if joking, there is a trend of TikTok users demanding the results of a time-sensitive process (like fermentation, renovation, or crafting, etc), of lamenting a “part 2,” so much so that users will only post about projects after full completion for fear of these comments. Infomo demands answers with immediacy, something that is not necessarily possible with true inquiry. There is a certain whataboutism that stems from this (I’m thinking about the infamous aforementioned Bean Soup TikTok) where everything must be for everyone equally, a radical centrist idea that everything produced must equally appeal to all possible persons. But of course, a bean soup must contain beans.

So perhaps it’s best to define these levels of query:

• Infomo: asking questions easily answered by common sense or google. Superficial questions which do not start conversation. Does not come from a place of genuine interest.

• Curiosity: asking questions from a real place of interest, not easily answered by a simple search. Requires some research and may start a conversation.

• Inquiry: asking questions with interest and purpose which not only requires research, but may require novel research. A question which starts and continues a conversation over a long period of time.

As an educator with a certain amount of expertise, I’m prepared to answer “curious” questions in my field. I might not be able to answer something related to inquiry. As an educator, my job is to get students to the place of inquiry, but they used to start from a place of curiosity. Now, I’m fighting to move them from infomo to curiosity before they leave my classroom.

Of course, part of the problem is the way we’ve structured education, a structure I can pin on Bush-era politics where schools are forced to teach to standardized tests. I am referring to the NCLB Act, a law signed in early 2002 which mandated testing in math and reading for grades 3-8, plus once in high school (and, naturally, any other subjects like social studies/history, the arts, and foreign languages were de-prioritized). Along with this testing came financial sanctions of schools which did not meet the NCLB Act’s loft standards. After years of this educational infrastructure, we’ve learned quite a bit: The NCLB Act hasn’t benefited anyone, has only hurt schools with lower-performing students, has proven the link between budget and performance, and allowed for outsized federal and state influence on school curricula. But legal repercussions aside, the point I want to highlight is how the system of punishment the NCLB Act invoked meant that teachers were forced to teach to poorly-designed standardized tests. These tests, similar to the ACT or SAT, do not predict student intelligence or success. This is a huge structural problem, and yet, teachers are still forced to bend to these tests for the sake of school funding. What results from this is a pedagogy based around regurgitating a “correct” answer, even for abstract and subjective studies like literature.

Students are taught that they must analyze texts in a certain way to fulfill multiple-choice directives, something any college-level professor of English should balk at. The joy of teaching literature and creative writing is the surprise, the turn, the volta. But surprise and multiple-choice tests are antithetical to each other. Instead, academics are reduced to a binary of right and wrong. There is no gray area, no room for discussion or debate around meaning, no quarter for a question which challenges the structure in place. Regardless of what the teacher might believe, or how, in a different setting, they might entertain the journey down a text-based digression (a true inquiry!), there is only one answer: We don’t have enough time; memorize the answer I give you; fill in the bubble all the way. Black-and-white thinking is the death of inquiry. It reinforces the idea that either you know something or you don’t and that you are owed the right answer (after all, isn’t that what a teacher’s job is now?).

Curiosity is a joy in teaching. With curiosity comes critique. In order to be curious, to inquire, one must observe and evaluate that which has already been presented and find some aspect lacking. Inquiry is the pursuit of that missing something, whether it be a new perspective, methodology, philosophy, etc. It asks a question about the state of things, a question which is necessarily critique. Critique is neither good nor bad, something students struggle with in the first few weeks of every creative writing class. Learning to understand critique takes time. It makes students defensive because, no matter how couched in compliments, it feels like a personal attack on ones’ work, effort, art, self. But classroom critique is merely striving toward betterment, asking “How can we take what you have here and push it a step further?” What I have observed is that those who can’t get over the defensive feelings start to shut out everything, including compliments. A compliment is also a critique. It tells the author what is working, what to keep, what others have identified with. But to deny critique, to become defensive, ultimately ends in denying all inquiry. I have never once told a student something they wrote was bad. Instead, I ask probing questions about the subject of their writing. I ask how they might go deeper or further in their exploration, or if they’ve considered different angles. Sometimes this works, meeting their defensiveness with questions to break through, and other times they won’t budge. They want me to tell them how to write the poem, or worse, they want me to re-write it for them. They want me to shower them with compliments instead of doing my job to teach them composition skills. They are incurious about the work of writing, a process steeped in inquiry.

Like other educators, I am also troubled by the rising dependency of students on generative AI systems like ChatGPT in their writing and education. These systems are deeply flawed and consistently wrong much of the time, and it isn’t because they need more time. They get dumber over time. Yet many students have now turned to AI as the answer for their infomo, treating these LLMs as search engines and accepting the wrong (or entirely fabricated!) information they receive as fact. Because ChatGPT purports to cross-examine and summarize information, it pretends to do the work of curiosity, of research. Instead it spreads dis- and mis-information. For the infomo-minded, this doesn’t matter. Accuracy of information can be corrected by someone else’s labor. But researchers have shown that, even when confronted with correct information, the misinformation sticks around in our brains.

I worry about this and the learned helplessness leftover from COVID. That is, the state in which students believe they can’t do something, so they don’t ever try. They don’t know the answer, so they don’t read the syllabus (but will email me to ask). They don’t know how to write a discussion post, so they don’t. They don’t know how to write a certain genre of essay, so they ask ChatGPT to do it. But many of these students want to pursue careers in fields which demand a graduate degree, or at the very least, critical thinking and media literacy skills. These are skills which won’t develop overnight, and certainly not without divestment from AI. Graduate school is all about inquiry, developing advanced skills in a field, whether as professionals or as researchers.

I also see the rise of infomo also as a fundamental lack of community, but also the desire for community (though it usually takes the form of a demand for community). On TikTok, I came across a video in which a woman asked, “How do the computers in Japan look?” Abruptly, the video switched to a man in his car yelling in response, “Go online! Look it up! You’re using a phone! Research! Look it up!” I couldn’t agree with him more, but this is a prime example of someone using infomo to try to start a conversation, to try and build community. Clearly, it backfired. Why? Because answering that question doesn’t open up a dialogue. It doesn’t lead to further inquiry. Someone can stitch the original video with a screenshot or picture of a Japanese keyboard and be done with it, with not a single word. The frustrating part of infomo is the demand that others do the effort of creating dialogue by answering a superficial question. I can see how the original poster might want to learn more about another online culture, but asking an incurious question shuts down conversation.

I mention the conversational aspect of this phenomenon because questions are not just the basis of education and scientific research. Questions are important for our personal growth, for therapy, for interpersonal relationships with family, friends, strangers. In the online spaces I inhabit, infomo requests kill conversational flow. Someone (often me) answers the question posed and that’s the end. In a community with several hundred active members, a question typically signals the start of a discussion or a debate. Instead, it has become an onerous task of googling something on the side and then pasting a link into the chat, the exact kind of activity the asker could have done for themselves. But of course we could ignore it! But then ignoring someone becomes a matter of a personal slight, of poor etiquette. Telling someone to google it by themselves comes across as rude and unwelcoming. This is another trouble of infomo: the demand is not only anti-conversationalist, but it sows the seeds of irritation in community members. Everyone deserves equitable open access to information, but no one deserves others’ constant, immediate labor in delivering that information. The beauty of information access is that we are each capable of finding our desiderate by ourselves. Our pursuit of information should never result in the resentment of others.

The rise of infomo is really just one symptom amongst many in the decline of media literacy, something which could be a book-length topic itself. But lack of curiosity, of the pursuit for making sense of world is troublesome. It speaks to the complacency and acceptance by others of information that should necessarily be questioned. In the next four years, we are going to see the meteoric destruction of our information infrastructure. In fact, we are already seeing it as Elon Musk and his “DOGE” infiltrates federal agencies on specious claims of government corruption and overspending. Even now, Musk posts disinformation on his X account in an attempt to satisfy the incurious. With no curiosity, comes no defense against this kind of fascist information-cleansing.

So, I’m worried. I am troubled when I see these trends on something as silly as social media. It is an indication that something is wrong. I’m not sure how to fix it when we are already demanding too much of our K-12 educators while not compensating them enough. Our federal government is cannibalizing any social program which might alleviate our problems. I don’t have a solution, except that we need to course-correct to prioritizing media literacy and do so quickly.