ST. LOUIS, MO (KMOX) - Most people are consuming a ton of information a day in small, bite-size bits, such as alerts and headlines. It's called "Infosnacking". "The term actually refers to our tendency to only read headlines and photo captions so that we're getting the snack of the information. But very rarely the entire meal," explains Media Literacy expert Julie Smith, "that's significant because in many cases, the headline doesn't even match the article and clickbait headlines are so popular. We click on things that really have no value whatsoever. Eight out of 10 people read the headlines of an article. Only two of 10 will read the article."
Smith says often, we're missing a lot of context, even though we take in a great deal of information, "in 2014 there was a study that we actually consume 34 gigabytes a day. That's enough to fill a laptop in a few days."
To hear more about "Infosnacking" click on the link below to listen to our podcast "What the Media?!!?" where KMOX Virtual Consumer Editor Megan Lynch and Smith talk about the challenge of trying to digest all of that data.