Do we have too much news?

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: Yana Collins Lehman, a film production accountant who lives in Brooklyn, knew something was amiss when her 5-year-old son, Beckett, started to announce to no one in particular, “I’m John McCain, and I approved this statement.”

Collins Lehman, 36, thought: “Oh my God, I’m watching too much news.”

But it is hard not to, she said, with the financial markets in meltdown, and that crisis increasingly intertwined with a frenzied presidential campaign entering the homestretch. This is why her own news diet has spiked to where it feels as if it’s taking over her life. And maybe her son’s, too.

“It’s such a drain on productivity,” Collins Lehman said. “It’s a compulsion.”

For many, the hunger for information is reminiscent of those harried, harrowing months after 9/11. But seven years ago, there was no iPhone, no Twitter, no YouTube. There was no Google Reader to endlessly feed people with updates on their favourite websites. Social networking sites, blogs and TiVo were in their infancy.

This explosion of information technology, when combined with an unusual confluence of dramatic — and ongoing — news events, has led many people to conclude that they have given their lives over to a news obsession. They find themselves taking breaks at work every 15 minutes to check the latest updates, and at the end of the day, taking laptops to bed. Then they pad through darkened homes in the predawn to check on the Asian markets.

Despite having a job that obliges her to keep up with the latest movies, Collins Lehman recently downgraded her Netflix subscription to two movies a month, she said, because she was spending so much time following the news.

Raymond L Roker, 40, who runs a music magazine called Urb and lives in Los Angeles, said that his media diet has swollen to nearly unmanageable proportions because of the turbulent current events. He sets his DVR to record more than 10 daily political shows, which can take four to five hours to sit through every night, and posts about politics continuously on his personal blog (he also blogs occasionally for The Huffington Post).

In addition, Roker said, he spends much of his remaining free time swapping political views with friends on Facebook. “And meanwhile, I should be running my mini media empire,” he said in an e-mail. “If that’s not addiction, I don’t know what is.”

Mary Beth Caschetta, 42, an advertising copywriter who lives in Provincetown, US, said she has been concerned about the direction of the country that she has been taking her Kindle to bed so she can track the headlines. In recent weeks, Caschetta said, the news has even invaded her dreams. A recent one had her grilling the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, about the economy over cocktails, she said.

“It’s just the last thing I think of every night before I go to sleep,” Caschetta said, referring to the news.

This spike in news interest is reflected in web traffic figures from Yahoo!’s political and financial news sites, according to the company. “Both sites are experiencing record traffic over the last few weeks,” said Brian Nelson, a Yahoo spokesman. “Finance has been operating at near capacity.”

Traffic on the financial channel jumped by 27% during the week of September 15, when Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch imploded as the simmering crisis boiled over, company figures showed.

Eric Klinenberg, a sociology professor at New York University, said people are unusually transfixed by news of the day because the economic crisis in particular seems to reach at every corner of their lives. Usually, he added, people can compartmentalise their lives into different spheres of activity, such as work, family and leisure. But now, “those spheres are collapsing into each other.”And the news is not just consequential, but whipsaw-volatile. Financial markets swing hundreds of points within an hour; poll numbers shift. This means that news these days has an unbelievably short shelf life, news addicts said. If you haven’t checked the headlines in the last half an hour, the world may already have changed.

Jeff Slate, a songwriter who lives in Manhattan, said that he has found himself logging on to the internet in the middle of the night to check the Asian financial markets, something he had not done for years. And a quick scan of the headlines usually leads him down an information rabbit hole, since almost every blog or news article links to a half-dozen others, which link to others. Even music blogs these days are filled with links to political news and commentary.