Being well-informed allows one to predict situations and make sound decisions, but being over-informed negatively impacts mental health by leading to a state of constant alert, which impairs critical thinking. In such a state, one becomes unable to deduce the meaning of an intended word from the record of an event, or to discern its pertinence or relevance based on its impact on daily life.
In addition to the above, it is inherent to the human condition to identify meanings and/or senses in messages received that seek to capture attention, encapsulated in content that passes for information, to which we assign a degree of importance in relation to the environment, in order to interpret them. Those who understand this can manipulate, by generating messages as stimuli, which have a very high probability of being selected from among many others because they become relevant in a particular situation. This makes it impossible to distinguish between news and malicious rumor, even more so in a situation like the catastrophe caused by the double earthquake that occurred more than two months ago, due to the prolonged state of alert in which we remained because of the successive tremors and their multiple aftershocks.
Information overload is another manipulation strategy that generates a state of exhaustion through excessive information or misinformation, preventing its evaluation. This leads to acceptance of information that reinforces what is already considered true, or conversely, to rejection due to its unreliability. It is related to the excessive use of cell phones, which connect to social media, highly toxic due to the oversaturation of virulent content. Some symptoms of information overload include confusion and the resulting inability to make decisions.
An example of this, and even of double manipulation through the dissemination of fake news, was the supposed tsunami warning issued shortly after the double earthquake, when we were still trying to understand what had happened. Yet, another tragedy was being announced while the government was already taking action to respond to the catastrophe. This demonstrates why Venezuela has become a laboratory for manipulation, whether through abuse of power or inequality, in a recurring attempt to undermine the nation-state.
