As someone ever-eager to flaunt my grammatical shallowness, I felt chagrined recently when a friend dropped "infobesity" into the conversation before I'd had a chance to claim this latest buzzword and introduce it in my column.

People are suffering form info-besity. They are constantly snacking on LOLcats, on Psy on The Harlem Shake while similarly nibbling on Syria or tsunamis or European austerity and Australian politics.

What does a balanced diet of information look like? The information served up by commercial television can be seen as poor in fiber and high in the information equivalent of fat and sugar. Can we become "infobese" from overconsumption?

Similarly, the plenitude of information has brought about a new disease: infobesity. Newspapers, magazines, television and the Internet are producing far more information than we can absorb. Now, no one is being bombarded, i.e. forced to absorb information they don't want; but information seduces us into ingesting too much, just like food.