"
Information overload" is a term coined by
Alvin TofflerAlvin Toffler is an American writer and futurist, known for his works discussing the digital revolution, communication revolution, corporate revolution and technological singularity. A former associate editor of Fortune magazine, his early work focused on technology and its impact...
which refers to an excess amount of information being provided, making processing and absorbing tasks very difficult for the individual because sometimes we cannot see the validity behind the information.
As the world moves into a new era of globalization, an increasing number of people are connecting to the
InternetThe Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standardized Internet Protocol Suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
to conduct their own research and are given the ability to produce as well as consume the data accessed on an increasing number of
websiteA website is a collection of related web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are addressed with a common domain name or IP address in an Internet Protocol-based network...
s.
Users are now classified as active users because more people in society are participating in the Digital and Information Age.
"
Information overload" is a term coined by
Alvin TofflerAlvin Toffler is an American writer and futurist, known for his works discussing the digital revolution, communication revolution, corporate revolution and technological singularity. A former associate editor of Fortune magazine, his early work focused on technology and its impact...
which refers to an excess amount of information being provided, making processing and absorbing tasks very difficult for the individual because sometimes we cannot see the validity behind the information.
As the world moves into a new era of globalization, an increasing number of people are connecting to the
InternetThe Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standardized Internet Protocol Suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
to conduct their own research and are given the ability to produce as well as consume the data accessed on an increasing number of
websiteA website is a collection of related web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are addressed with a common domain name or IP address in an Internet Protocol-based network...
s.
Users are now classified as active users because more people in society are participating in the Digital and Information Age. More and more people are considered to be active writers and viewers because of their participation. This flow has created a new life where we are now dependent on access to information. Therefore we see an information overload from the access to so much information, almost instantaneously, without knowing the validity of the content and the risk of misinformation.
According to Sohora Jha, journalists are using the web to conduct their research, getting information regarding interviewing sources and press releases, updating news online, and thus it shows the gradual shifts in attitudes because of the rapid increase in the Internet.
Lawrence LessigLawrence "Larry" Lessig is an American academic and political activist. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications....
has described this as the "read-write" nature of the internet.
Origin
A quite early example of the term information overload can be found in an article by Jacob Jacoby, Donald Speller and Carol Kohn Berning, who conducted an experiment on 192 housewives which was said to confirm the hypothesis that more information about brands would lead to poorer decision making.
But long before that, the idea was introduced by Diderot, although it wasn't by the term 'information overload': "As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes." –
Denis DiderotDenis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic and writer. He was a prominent figure during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie....
, "
EncyclopédieEncyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers was a general encyclopedia published in France between 1751 and 1772, with later supplements and revisions in 1772, 1777 and 1780 and numerous foreign editions and later derivatives.Its introduction, the Preliminary...
" (1755)
General causes
The general causes of information overload include:
- A rapidly increasing rate of new information being produced
- The ease of duplication and transmission of data across the Internet
- An increase in the available channels of incoming information (e.g. telephone, e-mail
Electronic mail, often abbreviated as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages, designed primarily for human use...
, instant messagingInstant messaging is a form of real-time communication between two or more people based on typed text. The text is conveyed via devices connected over a network such as the Internet.-Overview:...
, rssRSS is a three-letter abbreviation that can stand for a wide variety of terms:-Mathematics:* Root-sum-square, the square root of the sum of the squares of the elements of a data set* Residual sum of squares in statistics-Technology:...
)
- Large amounts of historical information to dig through
- Contradictions and inaccuracies in available information
- A low signal-to-noise ratio
Signal-to-noise ratio is an electrical engineering measurement, also used in other fields , defined as the ratio of a signal power to the noise power corrupting the signal...
- A lack of a method for comparing and processing different kinds of information
- The pieces of information are unrelated or do not have any overall structure to reveal their relationships
E-mail remains a major source of information overload, as people struggle to keep up with the rate of incoming messages. As well as filtering out unsolicited commercial messages (
spamE-mail spam, also known as junk e-mail, is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by e-mail. A common synonym for spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail . Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk...
), users also have to contend with the growing use of e-mail attachments in the form of lengthy reports, presentations and media files.
A December 2007 New York Times blog post described E-mail as "a $650 Billion Drag on the Economy", and the New York Times reported in April 2008 that "E-MAIL has become the bane of some people's professional lives" due to information overload, yet "none of [the current wave of high-profile Internet startups focused on email] really eliminates the problem of e-mail overload because none helps us prepare replies".
Technology investors reflect similar concerns.
In addition to e-mail, the
World Wide WebThe World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view Web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them using hyperlinks...
has provided access to billions of pages of information. In many offices, workers are given unrestricted access to the Web, allowing them to manage their own research. The use of
search engineA search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...
s helps users to find information quickly. However, information published online may not always be reliable, due to the lack of authority-approval or a compulsory accuracy check before publication. This results in people having to cross-check what they read before using it for decision-making, which takes up more time.
Response of business and government
Many academics, corporate decision-makers, and federal policy-makers recognize the magnitude and growing impact of this phenomenon. In June 2008 a group of interested researchers from a diverse set of corporations, smaller companies, academic institutions and consultancies created the Information Overload Research Group (
IORG), a non-profit interest group dedicated to raising awareness, sharing research results and promoting the creation of solutions around Information Overload.
Recent research suggests that an "
attention economyAttention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems.In this perspective Thomas H. Davenport and J. C...
" of sorts will naturally emerge from information overload, allowing Internet users greater control over their online experience with particular regard to communication mediums such as e-mail and instant messaging. This could involve some sort of cost being attached to e-mail messages. For example, managers charging a small fee for every e-mail received - e.g. $5.00 - which the sender must pay from their budget. The aim of such charging is to force the sender to consider the necessity of the interruption. However, such a suggestion undermines the entire basis of the popularity of e-mail, namely that e-mails are free.
Media
Media like the internet are conducting research to promote awareness of information overload. In
http://informationr.net/ir/12-4/paper326.html, Kyunghye Kim, Mia Liza A. Lustria, Darrell Burke, and Nahyun Kwon conducted a study regarding people who have encountered information overload while searching for health information about cancer and what the impact on them was. The conclusion drawn from the research discusses how health information should be distributed and that information campaigns should be held to prevent irrelevant or incorrect information being circulated on the internet.
Other than that, there are many books published to encourage awareness of information overload. Books like "Surviving Information Overload" by Kevin A. Miller and "Managing Information Overload" by Lynn Lively.
Clay Shirky
In September 2008,
Clay ShirkyClay Shirky is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He teaches New Media as an adjunct professor at New York University's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program...
gave a presentation with the title "It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure" at the Web 2.0 Expo. He argued that information abundance has been a problem since Gutenberg's invention of the printing press.
The Problem of Organization
Some cognitive scientists and graphic designers have emphasized the distinction between raw information and information in a form we can use in thinking. In this view, information overload may be better viewed as organization underload. That is, they suggest that the problem is not so much the volume of information but the fact that we can't discern how to use it well in the raw or biased form it is presented to us. Authors who have taken this tack include graphic artist and architect
Richard Saul WurmanRichard Saul Wurman is an architect and graphic designer. He is considered a pioneer in the practice of making information understandable....
(the man who coined the phrase "information architect") and statistician and cognitive scientist
Edward TufteEdward Rolf Tufte is an American statistician and Professor Emeritus of statistics, information design, interface design and political economy at Yale University.- Biography :...
. Wurman uses the term "information anxiety" to describe our attitude toward the volume of information in general and our limitations in processing it. Tufte primarily focuses on quantitative information and explores ways to organize large complex datasets visually to facilitate clear thinking.
Related terms
- A similar term "information pollution" was coined by Jakob Nielsen
Jakob Nielsen is a leading web usability consultant. He holds a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction from the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen...
.
- The term "interruption overload" has begun to appear in newspapers such as the Financial Times
The Financial Times is a British international business newspaper. It is a morning daily newspaper published in London and is printed at 22 sites...
.
- Continuous Partial Attention
The term Continuous Partial Attention was coined by Linda Stone in 1998. Author Steven Berlin Johnson describes this as a kind of multitasking: “It usually involves skimming the surface of the incoming data, picking out the relevant details, and moving on to the next stream. You’re paying...
- Multi-tasking
See also
- Glass cockpit
A glass cockpit is an aircraft cockpit that features electronic instrument displays. Where a traditional cockpit relies on numerous mechanical gauges to display information, a glass cockpit uses several displays driven by flight management systems, that can be adjusted to display flight information...
- Information explosion
Information explosion is a term that describes the rapidly increasing amount of published information and the effects of this abundance of data. As the amount of available data grows, the problem of managing the information becomes more difficult, which can lead to information overload.
The...
- Overchoice
Overchoice refers to a problem facing consumers in the postindustrial society: too many choices.Overchoice is the result of technological progress. Since the beginning of Industrial Revolution, each year, more and more products are being offered...
- Attention management
Attention management refers to models and tools for supporting the management of attention at the individual or at the collective level , and at the short term of at a longer terms ....
- Attention economy
Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems.In this perspective Thomas H. Davenport and J. C...
- Stress management
Stress management is the amelioration of stress, especially chronic stress.-Historical foundations:Walter Cannon and Hans Selye used animal studies to establish the earliest scientific basis for the study of stress...
- Time management
Time management refers to a range of skills, tools, and techniques used to manage time when accomplishing specific tasks, projects and goals...
- Information pollution
Information pollution is the contamination of information supply with irrelevant, redundant, unsolicited and low-value information. The spread of useless and undesirable information can have a detrimental effect on human activities...