A Case of Personal Digiphrenia

Image courtesy of the infamous, "You are tearing me apart, Lisa!" scene from Tommy Wiseau's The Room.

I've been tardy to post of late, because I've been experiencing Douglas Rushkoff's famous digiphrenia on a personal level. As a professional information sleuth, I have to help others locate difficult to find publications. Often, these publications are online and hiding behind my institution's proxy. They can only be accessed with the proper authorization. If the platform that holds access to these publications isn't riddled with problems, the proxy that permits access to a particular platform or its publications is suffering problems.

I have to troubleshoot problems accessing all this information, and I do so via a variety of media: in-person, via e-mail, by phone, and via live chat. This being a weekend day means that I am alone in providing these services with little to no backup. Today, I've been inundated with help requests, many of them coming at me simultaneously. While it's great that my institution insists on providing convenience and accessibility to our users through multiple pathways, on days like this, it can be overwhelming.

I am alone, of course, in the analog sense, and yet I appear to be present in multiple places online. The "live chat" service I help provide makes no indication of how many people are actually online to help. For all the world knows, there are thirty people online to help with every user's beck and call. However, clearly, that's not the case. I am but one man trying in some cases to answer three, four, sometimes five questions at once. In this situation, my digital persona may appear multiplicative, like I'm in many places at once many times over. My analog persona is just two hands, one head, and one pair of eyes to handle all these queries hurling at me simultaneously. I feel as if I'm being torn apart!