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I want to share with you a personal story \u2013 an experience that I dealt with about four months ago that caused me a great deal of anxiety: I found a flea on my dog.\u00a0 That\u2019s right a<\/em><\/strong> flea; not multiple fleas, a<\/em><\/strong> flea.\u00a0 But I panicked.\u00a0 I vacuumed everything \u2013 couches, throw pillows, mattresses, floors \u2013 twice a day, every day for at least three weeks.\u00a0 I mopped every other day.\u00a0 I washed everything in the house three times a week.\u00a0 I bought some of that terrible chemical shampoo and washed my poor pup with it. I also bought my dog some dog treats from KarmaPets<\/a> to calm his discomfort during the time.\u00a0 I flea combed her three times a day.\u00a0 I set up flea traps in every room before bed.\u00a0 I caught three more fleas.\u00a0 I started having recurring dreams about fleas multiplying on my dog \u2013 growing in size as in an arcade game while I tried to knock them out one by one.\u00a0 My language changed.\u00a0 I started singing the Pokemon \u2013 \u201cGotta Catch All\u201d song while vacuuming and talking like Ted Cruz, using phrases like \u201cwe\u2019ve got to obliterate\u2026,\u201d etc.\u00a0 My partner was seriously concerned about my sanity.<\/p>\n Now this sort of anxiety is partly personal \u2013 an anxiety over microscopic things that have the potential to grow completely out of my control.\u00a0 But I\u2019m going to argue that there is more to it than that.\u00a0 I\u2019ve talked to pet owners who \u2013 upon spotting fleas \u2013 tore apart their houses, spent hundreds of dollars on flea products, set off chemicals in their homes that notably released the same poisonous gases that were instrumental to the India\u2019s Bhopal disaster<\/a>.\u00a0 We can\u2019t all be this crazy.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think we are.<\/p>\n For one, new information systems \u2013 PetMD, e-wiki articles, and veterinary forums \u2013 \u00a0instigate panic while setting impossible standards for care. While supposedly designed to help diagnose and treat our own issues, these are the same links that warn that for every one flea, there are a hundred fleas.\u00a0 The same links that show images of hundreds of tiny bugs weaving in between a dog\u2019s fur.\u00a0 The same links that break down the scientific version of the flea life cycle into colloquial terms so that you know how serious the issue is.\u00a0 The same links that suggest that you throw out carpets and bedding and that you vacuum ferociously several times a day for weeks.\u00a0 They state at the beginning \u201cDon\u2019t panic!\u00a0 You can get through this.\u201d and then proceed to list a series of chores that working families cannot possibly get through.\u00a0 It\u2019s dizzying to click through them.<\/p>\n Now, these arguments seem to substantiate claims that Google has provoked a sort of \u201ccyberchondria\u201d \u2013 where Googling to find information about our health problems, pet problems, and house problems leads people to overact \u2013 to jump to irrational conclusions.\u00a0 That the freckle on their finger must be cancer.\u00a0 Or that the spot on their dog means they need to burn their houses down.\u00a0 But I find this to be an extremely gendered argument \u2013 one that positions information seekers as emotionally-charged and unreasonable \u2013 characterized by conceptions of a feminine excessiveness as Luce Irigaray would say.\u00a0 You see this gendering in the articles that advise against Googling health symptoms \u2013 in magazines like Glamour<\/a> and Women\u2019s Health<\/a> \u2013 articles that disproportionately feature images of anxious women staring at computer screens.\u00a0\u00a0 Articles that include statistics<\/a> such as \u201cone in four British women have misdiagnosed themselves on the Internet.\u201d Such depictions, I believe, stem from a very problematic assumption that women can\u2019t think logically when exposed to provocative information.<\/p>\n New \u201canxieties of care\u201d are induced, not so much by the sensationalized information in online articles (though this is certainly part of it), nor the raising costs of expert care advice from doctors, vets, exterminators (though is certainly part of it too).\u00a0 Instead, families today constantly find themselves in information double binds \u2013 binds that make it impossible to at once meet new standards of care (house care, pet care, and child care, etc.) and at the same time attend to the grounded knowledge they\u2019ve developed in their experience being caregivers.\u00a0 Impulsive cleaning, spending, and chemical spraying, in this sense, are not a result of mis-information or falling prey to \u201ccyberchondria\u201d but instead are anxious responses to being embedded in conflicting communication streams \u2013 streams mediated by algorithms, science, capital, and gendering.<\/p>\n Double bind theory, proposed by Gregory Bateson, suggests that anxiety can be provoked in situations where an individual must respond to two or more conflicting streams of communication.\u00a0 For instance, imagine a mother tells her child, \u201cI demand that you disobey me.\u201d\u00a0 There is no way for the child to attend to both requests.\u00a0 Today\u2019s parents face the same communicative contradictions when it comes to care.<\/p>\n Take the flea problem for example.\u00a0 The #1 recommended flea product by veterinarians and many online sources is Advantix II, produced by Bayer, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.\u00a0 Bayer is also acclaimed for a particularly long history of chemical and drug-related corporate injustices<\/a>, which may not be of particular interest to caregivers until they come across other web articles<\/a> describing what can happen if you \u201cpoison\u201d your dog with toxic chemicals<\/a>.\u00a0 Or consider the bug bomb issue.\u00a0 While many online sources describe it as the only way<\/em> to ensure that you kill off the bugs in your home \u2013 to exterminate them at all stages of the flea life cycle \u2013 other articles remind us that such insecticides can cause serious long-term health effects<\/a>, particularly for young children. \u00a0Caregivers know that any product that tells you to cover all of the surfaces in your house and stay away from it with the windows closed for several hours is not the safest choice for the kids and pets.\u00a0 They see that companies they\u2019ve learned to hate \u2013 such as Monsanto<\/a> \u2013 sponsor the top medical\/pet advice websites.\u00a0 And that veterinarians make their living by recommending expensive pharmaceutical products.\u00a0 \u00a0And if they\u2019re not going to purchase these products, they better be prepared to clean \u2013 every second of every day \u2013 for months, which is just not an option for most working families today.<\/p>\n In the midst of such information binds, I found myself searching, relentlessly, for anything rational, anything that didn\u2019t require me to be super-mommy \u2013 to pull off the impossible.\u00a0 But unfortunately, with information infrastructures so heavily mediated today \u2013 more information tends to equate to more expectations, while simultaneously exposing more contradictions.\u00a0 It\u2019s much like Ruth Cowan describes in her book More Work for Mother<\/em> \u2013 how modern labor-saving technologies for the home, such as the vacuum and the washing machine, set new standards for cleanliness, thus creating more work for mothers, not less.\u00a0 Information infrastructures, designed to help families deal with medical or home issues, have set impossible standards for care.\u00a0 Digesting this information is an anxiety-ridden experience \u2013 one that pushes families to consider how much time they are willing to devote, how much money they are willing to spend, and what toxic chemicals they are willing to expose themselves to.\u00a0 It\u2019s a gendered experience; women, in particular, are held to higher expectations, while simultaneously, couched as emotionally-charged and overreacting when they respond to them.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t worry parents; you are not alone.\u00a0 New information systems are making us all a little more anxious \u2013 a little more prone to panic.\u00a0 And it\u2019s not because we\u2019re irrational or foolish.\u00a0 It\u2019s because we\u2019re embedded in an information infrastructure that\u2019s impossible to move within.\u00a0 \u00a0Key to double bind theory, though, is that working the double bind \u2013 resisting and weaving your way out of it \u2013 leads to emotional growth.\u00a0 Recognizing how information sources compete \u2013 how they are so often shaped by macro-forces that are particularly antagonistic to women \u2013 can be the best medicine for dealing with anxieties of care.<\/p>\n Lindsay Poirier is a PhD Student in Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.\u00a0 She occasionally Tweets at\u00a0@lindsaypoirier<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>http:\/\/lindsaypoirier.com\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n