Information overload
Encyclopedia
"Information overload" is a term popularized by Alvin Toffler
Alvin Toffler
Alvin Toffler is an American writer and futurist, known for his works discussing the digital revolution, communication revolution, corporate revolution and technological singularity....

 in his bestselling 1970 book Future Shock
Future Shock
Future Shock is a book written by the futurist Alvin Toffler in 1970. In the book, Toffler defines the term "future shock" as a certain psychological state of individuals and entire societies. His shortest definition for the term is a personal perception of "too much change in too short a period of...

. It refers to the difficulty a person can have understanding an issue and making decisions that can be caused by the presence of too much information. The term itself is mentioned in a 1964 book by Bertram Gross, The Managing of Organizations.

The term and concept precede the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 and can be viewed from a library and information sciences perspective or viewed as a psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

 phenomenon. In psychology, information overload relates to an overabundance of incoming information into the senses. Toffler's explanation of it presents information overload as the Information Age
Information Age
The Information Age, also commonly known as the Computer Age or Digital Age, is an idea that the current age will be characterized by the ability of individuals to transfer information freely, and to have instant access to knowledge that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously...

's version of sensory overload
Sensory overload
Sensory overload , related to Cognitive load in general, is a condition where one or more of the senses are strained and it becomes difficult to focus on the task at hand...

, a term that had been introduced in the 1950s. Sensory overload was thought to cause disorientation and lack of responsiveness. Toffler posited information overload as having the same sorts of effects, but on the higher cognitive functions, writing: "When the individual is plunged into a fast and irregularly changing situation, or a novelty-loaded context ... his predictive accuracy plummets. He can no longer make the reasonably correct assessments on which rational behavior is dependent."

As the world moves into a new era of globalization, an increasing number of people are connecting to the Internet to conduct their own research and are given the ability to produce as well as consume the data accessed on an increasing number of website
Website
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...

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 in danger of becoming dependent on this method of 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 Sonora Jha of Seattle University
Seattle University
Seattle University is a Jesuit Catholic university located in the First Hill neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, USA.SU is the largest independent university in the Northwest US, with over 7,500 students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs within eight schools, and is one of 28 member...

, 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 Lessig
Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence "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, and he has called for state-based activism to promote substantive...

 has described this as the "read-write" nature of the internet.

Early history

Information overload has been documented throughout periods where advances in technology
Technology
Technology is the making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, machinery, and procedures. The word technology comes ;...

 have increased a production of information. As early as the 3rd or 4th century BC, people regarded information overload with disapproval. Around this time, in Ecclesiastes
Ecclesiastes
The Book of Ecclesiastes, called , is a book of the Hebrew Bible. The English name derives from the Greek translation of the Hebrew title.The main speaker in the book, identified by the name or title Qoheleth , introduces himself as "son of David, king in Jerusalem." The work consists of personal...

 12:12, the passage revealed the writer’s comment “of making books there is no end” and in 1st century AD, Seneca the Elder
Seneca the Elder
Lucius or Marcus Annaeus Seneca, known as Seneca the Elder and Seneca the Rhetorician , was a Roman rhetorician and writer, born of a wealthy equestrian family of Cordoba, Hispania...

 commented, that “the abundance of books is distraction”. Similar complaints around the growth of books were also mentioned in China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...

.

Renaissance

Around 1440 AD, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press
Printing press
A printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...

 and this marked another period of information proliferation. As a result of lowering production costs, generation of printed materials ranging from pamphlets, manuscripts to books were made available to the average person. Scholars complained about the abundance of information for a variety of reasons such as the diminishing quality of text as printers rushed to print manuscripts and they also felt the supply of new information was distracting and difficult to manage.

Information age

In the 20th Century, advances in computer
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

 and information technology
Information technology
Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...

 introduced the internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

.

In more recent years, of the information age
Information Age
The Information Age, also commonly known as the Computer Age or Digital Age, is an idea that the current age will be characterized by the ability of individuals to transfer information freely, and to have instant access to knowledge that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously...

, information overload is experienced as distracting and unmanageable information such as email spam, email
Email
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

 notifications, instant messages, Tweets and Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

 updates in the context of the work environment.As a result, an interruption from such information negatively affects the attention
Attention
Attention is the cognitive process of paying attention to one aspect of the environment while ignoring others. Attention is one of the most intensely studied topics within psychology and cognitive neuroscience....

 of an employee. It can take upwards of twenty-five minutes before the worker returns to their assigned tasks after viewing an email.

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 Diderot
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie....

, "Encyclopédie
Encyclopédie
Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers was a general encyclopedia published in France between 1751 and 1772, with later supplements, revised editions, and translations. It was edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert...

" (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
    E-mail
    Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

    , instant messaging
    Instant messaging
    Instant Messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based chatting communication in push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet...

    , rss
    RSS
    -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:* RSS , "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary", a family of web feed formats...

    )
  • Large amounts of historical information to dig through
  • Contradictions and inaccuracies in available information
  • A low signal-to-noise ratio
    Signal-to-noise ratio
    Signal-to-noise ratio is a measure used in science and engineering that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise. It is defined as the ratio of signal power to the noise power. A ratio higher than 1:1 indicates more signal than noise...

  • 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 (spam
E-mail spam
Email spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited bulk email , is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by email. Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. One subset of UBE is UCE...

), users also have to contend with the growing use of email 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".

In January of 2011, Eve Tahmincioglu, a writer for MSNBC, wrote an article titled "Dealing with a bloated inbox." Compiling statistics with expert commentary, she reported that there were 294 billion emails sent each day in 2010, up 50 billion from 2009. Quoted in the article, workplace productivity expert Marsha Egan stated that people need to differentiate between working on e-mail and sorting through it. This meant that rather than responding to every email right away, users should delete unnecessary emails and sort the others into action or reference folders first. Egan then went on to say “We are more wired than ever before, and as a result need to be more mindful of managing email or it will end up managing us.”

The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...

quoted Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review
Harvard Business Review
Harvard Business Review is a general management magazine published since 1922 by Harvard Business School Publishing, owned by the Harvard Business School. A monthly research-based magazine written for business practitioners, it claims a high ranking business readership among academics, executives,...

 and the author of The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, as saying that email exploits a basic human instinct to search for new information, causing people to become addicted to "mindlessly pressing levers in the hope of receiving a pellet of social or intellectual nourishment". His concern is shared by Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

, who stated that “instantaneous devices” and the abundance of information people are exposed to through e-mail and other technology-based sources could be having an impact on the thought process, obstructing deep thinking, understanding, impedes the formation of memories and makes learning more difficult. This condition of "cognitive overload" results in diminished information retaining ability and failing to connect remembrances to experiences stored in the long-term memory, leaving thoughts "thin and scattered". This is also manifest in the education process.

Technology investors reflect similar concerns.

In addition to e-mail, the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

 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 engine
Search engine
A 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 economy
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....

" 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 and to train the reader to process information more consciously and effectively. Books like "Surviving Information Overload" by Kevin A. Miller, "Managing Information Overload" by Lynn Lively. and "The Principle of Relevance" by Stefania Lucchetti deal effectively with the topic.

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 Wurman
Richard Saul Wurman
Richard Saul Wurman is an architect and graphic designer who is considered to be a pioneer in the practice of making information easily understandable. Wurman has written and designed over 80 books, and created the TED conferences, but remains associated only with TEDMED.-Early life and...

 (the man who coined the phrase information architect) and statistician and cognitive scientist Edward Tufte
Edward Tufte
Edward Rolf Tufte is an American statistician and professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University. He is noted for his writings on information design and as a pioneer in the field of data visualization....

. 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 (usability consultant)
    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.-Early life and background:...

    .
  • The term "interruption overload" has begun to appear in newspapers such as the Financial Times
    Financial Times
    The Financial Times is an international business newspaper. It is a morning daily newspaper published in London and printed in 24 cities around the world. Its primary rival is the Wall Street Journal, published in New York City....

    .
  • Cognitive dissonance
    Cognitive dissonance
    Cognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Dissonance is also reduced by justifying,...

  • Continuous Partial Attention
    Continuous Partial Attention
    Continuous partial attention is the process of paying simultaneous attention to a number of sources of incoming information, but at a superficial level. The term was coined by Linda Stone in 1998...

  • Internet addiction
  • Learning curve
    Learning curve
    A learning curve is a graphical representation of the changing rate of learning for a given activity or tool. Typically, the increase in retention of information is sharpest after the initial attempts, and then gradually evens out, meaning that less and less new information is retained after each...

  • Memory
    Memory
    In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing memory....

  • Mind-expanding
  • Multi-tasking
    Human multitasking
    Human multitasking is the best performance by an individual of appearing to handle more than one task at the same time. The term is derived from computer multitasking. An example of multitasking is taking phone calls while typing an email...


See also

  • Glass cockpit
    Glass cockpit
    A glass cockpit is an aircraft cockpit that features electronic instrument displays, typically large LCD screens, as opposed to the traditional style of analog dials and gauges...

  • Information explosion
    Information explosion
    The information explosion is the rapid increase in the 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 Online Oxford English...

  • Overchoice
    Overchoice
    Overchoice, also referred to as "choice overload", is a term describing a problem facing consumers in the postindustrial society: too many choices. The term was first introduced by Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book, Future Shock....

  • Attention management
    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 or at a longer term ....

  • Attention economy
    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....

  • Lexicographic information cost
    Lexicographic information cost
    Lexicographic information cost is a new concept within the field of lexicography. The term refers to the difficulties and inconveniences that the user of a dictionary believes or feels are associated with consulting a particular dictionary or dictionary article...

  • Stress management
    Stress management
    Stress management is the alteration of stress and especially chronic stress often for the purpose of improving everyday functioning.Stress produces numerous symptoms which vary according to persons, situations, and severity. These can include physical health decline as well as depression. According...

  • Time management
    Time management
    Time management is the act or process of exercising conscious control over the amount of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase efficiency or productivity. Time management may be aided by a range of skills, tools, and techniques used to manage time when accomplishing specific...

  • Information pollution
    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...

  • Analysis paralysis
    Analysis paralysis
    The term "analysis paralysis" or "paralysis of analysis" refers to over-analyzing a situation, so that a decision or action is never taken, in effect paralyzing the outcome. A decision can be treated as over-complicated, with too many detailed options, so that a choice is never made, rather than...

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK