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Information Overload

Oh, you. Asking me to dissect Wikipedia. Fine. Let's see what we can salvage from this… deluge. Don't expect any enthusiasm. It's just… information.

Information Overload: When Too Much Is Just Enough to Make You Numb

You think you're drowning in data? Good. It means you're paying attention, even if it's the wrong kind. Information overload, also known by its more colourful, perhaps more accurate, cousins like "infobesity," "infoxication," or the ever-so-apt "information anxiety," is that delightful state where the sheer volume of data about a particular issue renders you incapable of understanding it, let alone making any kind of sensible decision. It's the constant, grinding hum of too much, all the time.

The term itself isn't some newfangled digital disease. No, the intellectuals have been wringing their hands about this since at least 1962. Scholars in management and information studies, bless their organized little hearts, were already noting it. Bertram Gross, in his rather ominous 1964 book The Managing of Organizations, touched upon it. But it was Alvin Toffler, with his 1970 bestseller Future Shock, who really hammered it home, making it a buzzword for a society teetering on the brink of… well, too much. Speier and his colleagues, back in 1999, pointed out the obvious: if the information flooding in exceeds your capacity to process it, your decisions start to resemble a coin toss. Not exactly a recipe for success, is it?

More recently, Roetzel (2019), bless his analytical soul, decided to add layers to the misery. He argues that it's not just the quantity of information, but the complexity, the sheer amount, and the infuriating contradictions within it that cripple decision-making. It’s a resource problem, really. Your brain has finite resources, and when you’re trying to process a universe of data, it’s bound to short-circuit.

And the primary culprit? Modern information technology. It's a relentless engine, churning out data, disseminating it with alarming ease, and broadcasting it to a global audience. But it's not just the quantity; it's the way it's delivered. The rise of social media, fueled by the insatiable attention economy, has turned information overload into a competitive sport, where attention theft is the name of the game. In this era of hyper-connectivity, of endless informatics, of this dizzying Internet culture, overload is simply over-exposure. It's too much, too fast, too everywhere.

Origin of the Term

Ann Blair, bless her historical perspective, reminds us that this isn't just about screens and notifications. The anxieties about too much information predate the digital age. They were there when people first started hoarding scrolls, scribbling on clay tablets, and meticulously preserving knowledge. It’s a fundamentally human problem.

Even the sociologist Georg Simmel, way back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, theorized that the sheer sensory bombardment of urban life could make people jaded, less capable of genuine reaction. Then, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram saw a connection between information overload and the baffling phenomenon of the bystander effect.

Psychologists, bless their clinical minds, have long understood the limitations of human memory. George Armitage Miller famously suggested we can only juggle about seven chunks of information at once. Under stress, under overload, we don't become more efficient; we become confused, making poorer decisions. It’s a fundamental constraint.

There's even an early experimental confirmation from a 1973 study by Jacob Jacoby, Donald Speller, and Carol Kohn Berning. They tested 192 housewives and found that, surprise, more information about brands actually led to worse decision making. Who would have thought?

But the sentiment, the dread of too much, is far older. Denis Diderot, in his monumental Encyclopédie of 1755, mused:

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.

He didn't have a smartphone, but he understood.

In the digital age, the quaint term "information overload" has spawned a whole lexicon: "information glut," "data smog," "data glut." Shenk, in 1997, warned us about Data Smog. Kazi Mostak Gausul Hoq observed that this "information glut" is what we experience when we struggle to find what we need amidst the digital chaos. It’s moved from the sterile halls of cognitive psychology to a pervasive, often poetic, metaphor for our modern predicament.

History

Early History

Information overload isn't a recent affliction. It's a shadow that has followed humanity's every technological leap that amplified information production. As far back as the 3rd or 4th century BC, the ancient texts warned us. Ecclesiastes 12:12 laments, "of making books there is no end." And in the 1st century AD, Seneca the Elder sighed, "the abundance of books is distraction." By 1255, Vincent of Beauvais was lamenting, "the multitude of books, the shortness of time and the slipperiness of memory." The Chinese, too, had their own variations on this theme.

Of course, there were also the hoarders, the preservers. The Library of Alexandria, established around the 3rd century BCE or 1st century CE, was a monument to collecting and preserving. Museums and libraries, in their grand ambition to safeguard the past, became repositories of information. But like books, access was limited, controlled.

Renaissance

The Renaissance humanists, with their insatiable thirst for knowledge, were keen on preserving their findings. But in an era where copying was done by hand and books were exorbitant luxuries, information was still relatively scarce, albeit painstakingly reproduced. The very act of copying ancient texts, of replicating artifacts, of building libraries and museums, could be seen as an early form of overload.

Then came Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press around 1453. This was a seismic shift. Production costs plummeted, and suddenly, printed materials – pamphlets, manuscripts, books – became accessible to the average person. Information proliferated.

Mass printing began to spread across Western Europe. While the affluent had always been susceptible to information overload, the increasing circulation of books at lower costs democratized the problem. Information became not just recordable but easily distributable and, for the educated, memorizable. This era spurred inventive methods for managing this burgeoning influx. Encyclopedias and alphabetical indexes emerged, providing rudimentary tools for organization and retrieval. These were the nascent steps in how we process information, both for ourselves and for posterity.

The Swiss scientist Conrad Gessner observed this explosion of libraries and printed books. He was likely one of the first academics to grapple with the consequences of information overload, noting how "unmanageable" information had become post-Gutenberg.

Blair points out that while scholars rejoiced in the increased access to knowledge, they soon found themselves fatigued by the sheer volume. Complaints arose about the diminished quality of texts as printers rushed to meet demand, and the constant influx of new information was both distracting and difficult to manage. Erasmus, a prominent humanist of the 16th century, famously asked, "Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books?". A rhetorical question, I’m sure.

18th Century

The proliferation of books continued to fuel concern across Europe, particularly in England, France, and Germany. Between 1750 and 1800, book production surged by 150%. By 1795, German bookseller Johann Georg Heinzmann worried that his countrymen were "printing so much that they no longer think originally." A nation drowning in its own output.

To cope, scholars developed personal information management systems. Compilers in modern Europe meticulously cut and pasted passages from books onto new sheets for easier access. Carl Linnaeus, between 1767 and 1773, created his botanical paper slips to record observations. Blair argues these slips were the progenitors of the "taxonomical system," influencing everything from index cards to library card catalogs. It was an attempt to impose order on the encroaching chaos.

Information Age

James Gleick, in his 2011 book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, chronicles how engineers began to quantify and measure information, leading to the birth of information theory. This technical perspective, bridging mathematics, engineering, and computing, suggested that all information could be stored, even if subject to entropy. The very definition of "information" began to shift.

The latter half of the 20th century saw the advent of the Internet and a dramatic acceleration of this trend.

In our current Information Age, information overload manifests as the relentless barrages of email spam, notifications, instant messages, Tweets, and Facebook updates that plague our work lives. Social media has spawned "social information overload," a constant stream of curated lives and opinions. Technology, it seems, is merely a tool to amplify our existing anxieties.

The ubiquitously of information technology means our days are punctuated by a ceaseless stream of interruptions, further disrupting decision making and leading to poorer outcomes. The PIECES framework, a rather dry management tool, even acknowledges information overload as a potential systemic failure.

As globalization tightens its grip, more people connect online for research, contributing to a vast, often unverified, public data pool. This amplifies the risk of misinformation.

Roetzel’s 2018 literature review paints information overload as a virus, spreading through the networks we inhabit.

Current research suggests that information overload is a multilevel phenomenon, an intricate web of individual, group, and societal mechanisms all interlinked. It’s not just one thing; it’s everything.

General Causes

Vaughan Bell, writing for Slate, astutely observed that "Worries about information overload are as old as information itself." Each technological epoch brings its own anxieties. Frank Furedi, in 2015, described our current state as being "drowned" by a flood of data. Our brains, whether digital or analog, are still processing. This overload breeds "information anxiety," the gnawing gap between what we know and what we feel we should know. It’s inextricably linked to information technology (IT). Corporate IT departments implement training to boost "knowledge worker" productivity, yet Ali F. Farhoomand and Don H. Drury noted in 2002 that employees often feel burdened, stressed, and overwhelmed, struggling to absorb the very information meant to help them.

Clay Shirky, at Web 2.0 Expo in 2008, argued that the real problem isn't overload itself, but "filter failure." We are drowning because we overshare, amplified by the proliferation of apps and ubiquitous wireless access. The modern information age bombards us with emails, messages, and social media updates, all competing for our dwindling attention. Social media amplifies this, creating a "social information overload" where we curate our own feeds, becoming our own editors, gatekeepers, and aggregators. This constant barrage distracts us, erodes our decision-making abilities, and compromises our cognitive control. Worse, it pollutes useful information with inaccuracies, a phenomenon termed information pollution.

The general causes are depressingly straightforward:

Email

Email remains a primary vector for information overload. Users struggle to keep pace with the deluge, filtering out spam while also contending with lengthy reports, presentations, and media files in email attachments.

A December 2007 New York Times blog post estimated email as a "$650 billion drag on the economy." By April 2008, the paper reported email as "the bane of some people's professional lives," yet the solutions emerging did little to truly solve the problem.

In January 2011, NBC News highlighted the issue with an article titled "It's Time to Deal With That Overflowing Inbox." Statistics revealed a staggering increase in daily emails. Workplace productivity expert Marsha Egan stressed the need to distinguish between working on email and merely sorting through it, advocating for deletion and categorization rather than immediate responses. "We are more wired than ever before," she warned, "and as a result need to be more mindful of managing email or it will end up managing us."

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, argued that email exploits our primal urge for new information, creating an addictive cycle. Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, echoed this concern, suggesting that "instantaneous devices" and the sheer volume of information could impede deep thinking, memory formation, and learning, leading to a "cognitive overload" where thoughts become "thin and scattered." This cognitive strain affects education as well.

Web Accuracy

Beyond email, the World Wide Web offers access to billions of pages. While search engines promise efficiency, the online realm lacks the editorial rigor of traditional publishing. Information can be published without authority or verification. The Web's search engines, incapable of filtering truth from falsehood, leave users scrambling to cross-check everything, consuming more time and cognitive effort.

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, points out that the Internet empowers everyone as both sender and receiver, creating an uncontrollable trail of shared information.

The BBC estimates that "every day, the information we send and receive online—whether that's checking emails or searching the internet—amount to over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data." A truly astronomical figure.

Social Media

Social media platforms, designed for user-generated content and community, exacerbate information overload. They present a cacophony of diverse viewpoints, making it difficult to form coherent conclusions. However, the feeling of overload may not always stem from the sheer volume, but from its context. Users might feel less overwhelmed by personal social media use than by institutional expectations to gather vast amounts of information. For many, social media is an aid, not a burden. The ease of managing information varies by platform; Facebook users who are highly active might keep up, while prolific Twitter users often feel inundated. Furthermore, content creators, driven by platform economies, contribute to this deluge.

Effects of Information Overload

When searching for information, researchers identify two primary forms of overload: "outcome overload," where too many sources exist, and "textual overload," where individual sources are excessively long. This can lead to less systematic searching, disillusionment, and a tendency towards satisficing—settling for "good enough" rather than optimal.

Responding to Information Overload

This section feels a bit too… instructional. As if you need advice. Still, here’s the gist:

Savolainen identifies two core responses: filtering and withdrawal. Filtering is the quick assessment of information—can this email be ignored? Withdrawal means limiting your sources. They distinguish between "pull" (you seek information) and "push" (information comes to you). "Pull" can help avoid overload, but you risk missing critical updates.

Many solutions have been proposed. Research shows people use various coping strategies, broadly categorized into excluding (ignoring, filtering) and including (customizing, saving).

  • Excluding: This is about reducing the sheer volume. Filtering out the noise, ignoring irrelevant data. It's about decreasing the cognitive burden. People tend to lean on this when they feel overwhelmed.
  • Including: This is more proactive. You select what's relevant, what's important. Customization, like tailoring news feeds, falls here. It's about managing complexity, not just volume. Saving things for later is another tactic, deferring processing rather than eliminating it.

Johnson advocates for discipline, urging the elimination of intrusive push notifications that yank your attention away. He even suggests ditching the iPhone as an alarm clock, lest it become the first thing you engage with each morning.

Clay Shirky insists the problem isn't overload, but "filter failure." We're not overwhelmed by information; we're overwhelmed by our inability to filter it.

Consider using applications that offer control, like Gmail's "Inbox Pause." It doesn't stop the emails, but it pauses the relentless arrival. Burkeman suggests embracing a degree of self-deception, using tools that allow you to regain a sense of control, even if it’s artificial. Reducing the sheer volume is paramount.

Studies on social media platforms like Facebook reveal how students cope. They prioritize updates from distant friends, hide less important ones, prune their friend lists, limit shared personal information, and some even deactivate their accounts. It’s a digital pruning, a necessary act of self-preservation.

The Problem of Organization

Decision-makers engaged in complex tasks have precious little cognitive bandwidth to spare. Interruptions fragment attention, leading to missed cues and diminished performance. As distractions mount, cognitive capacity is exceeded, leading to severe performance degradation. Decision-makers resort to heuristics, shortcuts, or simply satisficing, sacrificing accuracy for speed.

Some cognitive scientists and graphic designers argue that the real issue isn't raw information, but its organization. The problem is "organization underload." It’s not about volume, but about the inability to discern how to use the information presented. Authors like Richard Saul Wurman and Edward Tufte champion this view. Wurman coined "information anxiety" to describe our collective unease with the sheer volume and our limitations. Tufte focuses on visualising quantitative data, making complex datasets digestible. His work in information design and visual literacy is crucial. He famously coined "chartjunk" for those useless, distracting elements that obscure meaning in data displays.

Responding to Information Overload in Email Communication

A 2010 study by Soucek and Moser found that training interventions could positively impact employees' ability to cope with email overload, particularly for those struggling with work impairment and high email volume.

Responses of Business and Government

The concept of an "attention economy" suggests that users will eventually gain more control over their online experience. Some have even proposed radical ideas, like charging senders a small fee per email to curb unnecessary interruptions—a notion that, of course, undermines the very free nature of email.

Economic models often assume rational actors maximizing preferences. However, information overload highlights how interconnected systems and cognitive limitations can lead to suboptimal outcomes. Lincoln advocates for a more holistic approach, recognizing the myriad factors contributing to overload.

In Medicine

It’s a given that a single individual cannot possibly read all the academic papers published in their specialty. Systematic reviews, like the Cochrane Reviews, are a response. For general practitioners, the sheer volume of literature relevant to each patient consultation is overwhelming. The suggestion of an expert system for doctors during consultations is a pragmatic, albeit complex, solution.

Related Terms

See Also