Abstract

New media technologies were supposed to make life richer and give swifter access to the useful information that residents of the Information Society desire and need for work, school and daily life. Instead, it seems these people are increasingly bombarded with useless data, including spam that clog their email and 150 TV channels that offer little worth watching. Even a Google search for "information overload" reveals an unmanageable 300,000 results. There is no denying that Information overload is a fact of daily life. Through my extensive research of various sociological and cultural texts spanning 25 years, I found that the dull and the repetitive are believed to be increasingly present and that people must somehow find a way to get rid of this informational clutter to focus on the 'good' information that tells something new, useful, intelligent. However, if trivia and the fluff of pop culture are now an unavoidable part of Information Societies, it should be recognized as such before being automatically thrown out as useless. The case of the Japanese Otaku, as explored in my online research and through personal contacts, will reveal a more productive reaction to the supposed alienating and context-less data deluge of the Information Society. By appropriating the fluff of pop culture in their excessively dull collections, Otaku have turned the threat of information overload into the very source of their identity.