Information overload is part of Maslow's hierarchy of needs (2016)

This whole article seems to me to be a reductio ad absurdum of its central claim, that our needs for social connection and self-actualization explain Internet addiction. Basically the author claims this and then spends the rest of the article showing how his addiction to the Internet prevents him from having more social connection and self-actualization.

So no, information overload is not part of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Rather, avoiding it is.

> Before I lug my sluggish body from under the security of my warm sheets, I reach for my phone, pull it up inches away from my face, and start scrolling through whatever I missed overnight.

In my late 20s, I physically cannot do this anymore since my eyes start to hurt. I am forced to get out of bed and open the blinds until my eyes adjust to the light, then scroll through my phone. But by then I don't feel like scrolling as much. So that problem fixed itself :)

A different POV: in the (very) past information was rare, unreliable and expensive, information was flowing from a traveler to another, at horse/feet speed, with letters, book was as expensive as cars etc. That we (as a society) reach the target of machine-printing, books became far more spread and cheap and many state at that time that such expansion will be a disaster because quality will fall, peoples might became reachable by criminals who can corrupt fable minds in large, really large cohorts etc. AND YES, partially that happen. Than newspapers and telegraphs arrives and so on.

Long story short: the volume of things we can absorb skyrocket and so techniques to manage them, on one side, to master them on another side, start to get designed and tested.

Arriving in the modern era Xerox PARC invented the desktop concept, the modern Mundaneum implementation witch works, and invent many things to manage a very big quantity of information, things like tagging and scoring systems. Feeds happen allowing users to select contents from "the infosphere", feed readers who support tagging, filtering, scoring etc came to life and so on. On another side some decide such power is not good on citizen's hands, and decide to centralize Xerox "personal" techniques layering them under "aggregators", "social networks", "{up,down}votes" etc AND do their best to keep people attached to such services. On "the masses" side most simply keep living a day after another reading news convoyed to them almost passively, with no memory or personal organization.

Now "information overload" is just a way to drive people's thinking through emotions exploiting their passiveness and lack of rational interests.

It's not a matter of needs, of human nature etc it's a matter of understanding human psychology and use it to drive the flock. There are not so much details but just take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeaky_Dolphin as an example.

IF we keep a modern Desktop computing vision with personal tools we can satisfy our instincts at home, if not...

I'm not really sure what the point of the article is, though I don't see any relevance to the claim that it's a need.

It may be a new addiction, but certainly the point can't be made that the 1980s (or any other time in history) was a time where infomania was a serious concern for the majority of the population, even though more information was made available daily than in 300bc.

New sources of information overwhelm people who are not equipped for it, but this is a flaw in the individual not in our basic biology or psychology.