information overload

Information overload (also known as infobesity, infoxication, information anxiety, and information explosion) is the difficulty in understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information (TMI) about that issue, and is generally associated with the excessive quantity of daily information. The term "information overload" was first used as early as 1962 by scholars in management and information studies, including in Bertram Gross' 1964 book, ''The Managing of Organizations,'' and was further popularized by Alvin Toffler in his bestselling 1970 book ''Future Shock.'' Speier et al. (1999) said that if input exceeds the processing capacity, information overload occurs, which is likely to reduce the quality of the decisions.

In a newer definition, Roetzel (2019) focuses on time and resources aspects. He states that when a decision-maker is given many sets of information, such as complexity, amount, and contradiction, the quality of its decision is decreased because of the individual’s limitation of scarce resources to process all the information and optimally make the best decision.

The advent of modern information technology has been a primary driver of information overload on multiple fronts: in quantity produced, ease of dissemination, and breadth of the audience reached. Longstanding technological factors have been further intensified by the rise of social media and the attention economy, which facilitates attention theft. In the age of connective digital technologies, informatics, the Internet culture (or the digital culture), information overload is associated with over-exposure, excessive viewing of information, and input abundance of information and data.

Origin of the term

Even though information overload is linked to digital cultures and technologies, Ann Blair notes that the term itself predates modern technologies, as indications of information overload were apparent when humans began collecting manuscripts, collecting, recording, and preserving information. One of the first social scientists to notice the negative effects of information overload was the sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918), who hypothesized that the overload of sensations in the modern urban world caused city dwellers to become jaded and interfered with their ability to react to new situations. The social psychologist Stanley Milgram (1933–1984) later used the concept of information overload to explain bystander behavior.

Psychologists have recognized for many years that humans have a limited capacity to store current information in memory. Psychologist George Armitage Miller was very influential in this regard, proposing that people can process about seven chunks of information at a time. Miller says that under overload conditions, people become confused and are likely to make poorer decisions based on the information they have received as opposed to making informed ones.

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.

Long before that, the concept was introduced by Diderot, although it was not by the term "information overload":

In the internet age, the term "information overload" has evolved into phrases such as "information glut", "data smog", and "data glut" (''Data Smog'', Shenk, 1997). In his abstract, Kazi Mostak Gausul Hoq commented that people often experience an "information glut" whenever they struggle with locating information from print, online, or digital sources. What was once a term grounded in cognitive psychology has evolved into a rich metaphor used outside the world of academia.

History

Early history

Information overload has been documented throughout periods where advances in technology 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 12:12, the passage revealed the writer's comment "of making books there is no end" and in the 1st century AD, Seneca the Elder commented, that "the abundance of books is distraction". In 1255, the Dominican Vincent of Beauvais, also commented on the flood of information: "the multitude of books, the shortness of time and the slipperiness of memory." Similar complaints around the growth of books were also mentioned in China. There were also information enthusiasts. The Library of Alexandria was established around the 3rd century BCE or 1st century Rome, which introduced acts of preserving historical artifacts. Museums and libraries established universal grounds of preserving the past for the future, but much like books, libraries were only granted with limited access.

Renaissance

Renaissance humanists always had a desire to preserve their writings and observations, but were only able to record ancient texts by hand because books were expensive and only the privileged and educated could afford them. Humans experience an overload in information by excessively copying ancient manuscripts and replicating artifacts, creating libraries and museums that have remained in the present. Around 1453 AD, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press 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.

Following Gutenberg's invention, the introduction of mass printing began in Western Europe. Information overload was often experienced by the affluent, but the circulation of books were becoming rapidly printed and available at a lower cost, allowing the educated to purchase books. Information became recordable, by hand, and could be easily memorized for future storage and accessibility. This era marked a time where inventive methods were established to practice information accumulation. Aside from printing books and passage recording, encyclopedias and alphabetical indexes were introduced, enabling people to save and bookmark information for retrieval. These practices marked both present and future acts of information processing.

Swiss scientist Conrad Gessner commented on the increasing number of libraries and printed books, and was most likely the first academic who discussed the consequences of information overload as he observed how "unmanageable" information came to be after the creation of the printing press.

Blair notes that while scholars were elated with the number of books available to them, they also later experienced fatigue with the amount of excessive information that was readily available and overpopulated them. 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 the supply of new information being distracting and difficult to manage. Erasmus, one of the many recognized humanists of the 16th century asked, "Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books?".

18th century

Many grew concerned with the rise of books in Europe, especially in England, France, and Germany. From 1750 to 1800, there was a 150% increase in the production of books. In 1795, German bookseller and publisher Johann Georg Heinzmann said "no nation printed as much as the Germans" and expressed concern about Germans reading ideas and no longer creating original thoughts and ideas.

To combat information overload, scholars developed their own information records for easier and simply archival access and retrieval. Modern Europe compilers used paper and glue to cut specific notes and passages from a book and pasted them to a new sheet for storage. Carl Linnaeus developed paper slips, often called his botanical paper slips, from 1767 to 1773, to record his observations. Blair argues that these botanical paper slips gave birth to the "taxonomical system" that has endured to the present, influencing both the mass inventions of the index card and the library card catalog.

Information Age

In his book, ''The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood,'' published in 2011, author James Gleick notes that engineers began taking note of the concept of information, quickly associated it in a technical sense: information was both quantifiable and measurable. He discusses how information theory was created to first bridge mathematics, engineering, and computing together, creating an information code between the fields. English speakers from Europe often equated "computer science" to "''informatique'', ''informatica'', and ''Informatik''". This leads to the idea that all information can be saved and stored on computers, even if information experiences entropy. But at the same time, the term information, and its many definitions have changed.

In the second half of the 20th century, advances in computer and information technology led to the creation of the Internet.

In the modern Information Age, information overload is experienced as distracting and unmanageable information such as email spam, email notifications, instant messages, Tweets and Facebook(Meta) updates in the context of the work environment. Social media has resulted in "social information overload", which can occur on sites like Meta (previously Facebook), and technology is changing to serve our social culture.

In today's society, day-to-day activities increasingly involve the technological world where information technology exacerbates the number of interruptions that occur in the work environment. Management may be even more disrupted in their decision making, and may result in more poor decisions. Thus, the ''PIECES'' framework mentions information overload as a potential problem in existing information systems.

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 contribute as well as view data on an increasing number of websites. Users are now classified as active users because more people in society are participating in the Digital and Information Age. This flow has created a new life where humanity is now in danger of becoming dependent on this method of access to information where risks of the perpetuation of misinformation are greatly increased.

In a 2018 literature review, Roetzel indicates that information overload can be seen as a virus—spreading through (social) media and news networks.

General causes

In a piece published by ''Slate'', Vaughan Bell argues that "Worries about information overload are as old as information itself" because each generation and century will inevitably experience a significant impact with technology. In the 21st century, Frank Furedi describes how an overload in information is metaphorically expressed as a flood, which is an indication that humanity is being "drowned" by the waves of data coming at it. This includes how the human brain continues to process information whether digitally or not. Information overload can lead to "information anxiety", which is the gap between the information that is understood and the information that it is perceived must be understood. The phenomenon of information overload is connected to the field of information technology (IT). IT corporate management implements training to "improve the productivity of knowledge workers". Ali F. Farhoomand and Don H. Drury note that employees often experience an overload in information whenever they have difficulty absorbing and assimilating the information they receive to efficiently complete a task because they feel burdened, stressed, and overwhelmed.

At New York's Web 2.0 Expo in 2008, Clay Shirky's speech indicated that information overload in the modern age is a consequence of a deeper problem, which he calls "filter failure", where humans continue to overshare information with each other. This is due to the rapid rise of apps and unlimited wireless access. In the modern information age, information overload is experienced as distracting and unmanageable information such as email spam, email notifications, instant messages, Tweets, and Facebook updates in the context of the work environment. Social media has resulted in "social information overload", which can occur on sites like Facebook, and technology is changing to serve our social culture. As people view increasing amounts of information in the form of news stories, e-mails, blog posts, Facebook statuses, Tweets, Tumblr posts and other new sources of information, they become their own editors, gatekeepers, and aggregators of information. Social media platforms create a distraction as users attention spans are challenged once they enter an online platform. One concern in this field is that massive amounts of information can be distracting and negatively impact productivity and decision-making and cognitive control. Another concern is the "contamination" of useful information with information that might not be entirely accurate ( information pollution).

The general causes of information overload include:

* A rapidly increasing rate of new information being produced, also known as journalism of assertion, which is a continuous news culture where there is a premium put on how quickly news can be put out; this leads to a competitive advantage in news reporting, but also affects the quality of the news stories reported.
*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, instant messaging, RSS)
*Ever-increasing amounts of historical information to view.
*Contradictions and inaccuracies in available information, which is connected to misinformation.
*A low signal-to-noise ratio.
*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.

Email

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), 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 he current wave of high-profile Internet startups focused on emailreally eliminates the problem of e-mail overload because none helps us prepare replies".

In January 2011, Eve Tahmincioglu, a writer for NBC News, wrote an article titled "It's Time to Deal With That Overflowing Inbox". Compiling statistics with commentary, she reported that there were 294 billion emails sent each day in 2010, up from 50 billion in 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'' quoted Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review 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, 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, impeding the formation of memories and making 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.

Web accuracy

In addition to e-mail, the World Wide Web 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 engines 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. Internet information lacks credibility as the Web's search engines do not have the abilities to filter and manage information and misinformation. This results in people having to cross-check what they read before using it for decision-making, which takes up more time.

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, author of ''Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,'' argues that everyone can be a "participant" on the Internet, where they are all senders and receivers of information. On the Internet, trails of information are left behind, allowing other Internet participants to share and exchange information. Information becomes difficult to control on the Internet.

The BBC
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