IO[infobesity, infoxication,, ]
“Information is not knowledge.”
:Albert Einstein
1.I
attended a executive management course at IIM Ahmedabad in September 2016.My
first exposure to what I came to identify as IO happened in a talk given by its
Director :he told the participants that he does not read his e mails as
Director IIM Ahmedabad.A full time official does it,sifts it and post
filteration a small number remains he needs to come face to face with.Else,THE Director
told the participants ,the whole day long he shall be sifting e mails,reading
them,replying to them and at the end of the day go back home preening with the
satisfaction of having dealt with the whole inbox!
1.1 As
coaches and responsible professionals, we should be learning new things and
studying our field constantly. The world, and particularly the internet, is
full of information today; some of it is useful and much of it is useless.
Either or, this massive amount of information is in front of us, easily accessible
wherever you are. Countless people are sharing their material and ideas with
different motivations and goals in mind. The world is overflowing with
information!It is destroying attention,killing concentration,and creating
digital junk resulting in distraction leading to carbon copy average performers
in life.
2.Generally,
the term is associated with the excessive quantity of daily information.. The
term, information overload, was first used in Bertram Gross' 1964 book, The
Managing of Organizations and it was further popularized by Alvin Toffler in
his bestselling 1970 book Future Shock. Speier
et al. (1999) stated:
Information
overload occurs when the amount of input to a system exceeds its processing
capacity. Decision makers have fairly limited cognitive processing capacity. Consequently,
when information overload occurs, it is likely that a reduction in decision
quality will occur.
2.1 A newer
definition of information overload focuses on time and resource aspects:Information
overload is a state in which a decision maker faces a set of information comprising
the accumulation of individual informational cues of differing size and
complexity that inhibit the decision maker’s ability to optimally determine the
best possible decision. The probability of achieving the best possible decision
is defined as decision-making performance. The suboptimal use of information is
caused by the limitation of scarce individual resources. A scarce resource can be
limited individual characteristics (such as serial processing ability, limited
short-term memory) or limited task-related equipment (e.g., time to make a
decision, budget).
3.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
audience reached. Longstanding technological factors have been further
intensified by the rise of social media and the attention economy. In the age of connective
digital technologies, informatics, the Internet culture (or the digital
culture), information overload is associated with the over-exposure, excessive
consumption, and input abundance of information and data.
4. 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 the 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.
4.1 Now 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 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.
4.2 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.A 2012 survey by McKinsey Global Institute found
that the average worker spends 28% of work time managing email information
overload as a potential problem in existing information systems.
5.Information
Overload can lead to "information
anxiety," which is the gap between the information we understand
and the information that we think that we must understand. 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 consume 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).
6.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 dig through.
·
Contradictions and inaccuracies in available information, which is
connected to misinformation.
·
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.
7. E Mails:
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, 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 50 billion from 2009. 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, 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.
8.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.
BBC reports
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."
9.Social media
Social media is
defined as different online communities with shared content Most people see
information through social media in their lives as an aid to help manage their
day-to-day activities and not an overload.But it adds to the information
overload problem because so many individuals have access to it. It presents
many different views and outlooks on subject matters so that one may have
difficulty taking it all in and drawing a clear conclusion.
10.Dealing with information overload
Based on the
definition of information overload, there are two general approaches to deal
with it: 1) reduce the amount of incoming information, and 2) enhance the
ability to process information.
Johnson advises discipline which helps mitigate
interruptions and for the elimination of push or notifications. He explains
that notifications pull people's attentions away from their work and into
social networks and e-mails. He also advises that people stop using their
iPhones as alarm clocks which means that the phone is the first thing that
people will see when they wake up leading to people checking their e-mail right
away.
The use of
Internet applications and add-ons such as the Inbox Pause add-on for Gmail.
This add-on does not reduce the number of e-mails that people get but it pauses
the inbox. Burkeman in his article talks about the feeling of being in control
is the way to deal with information overload which might involve self-deception.
He advises to fight irrationality with irrationality by using add-ons that
allow you to pause your inbox or produce other results. Reducing large amounts
of information is key.
Dealing with IO
from a social network site such as Facebook, a study done by Humboldt University[41] showed some strategies that
students take to try and alleviate IO while using Facebook. Some of these
strategies included: Prioritizing updates from friends who were physically
farther away in other countries, hiding updates from less-prioritized friends,
deleting people from their friends list, narrowing the amount of personal
information shared, and deactivating the Facebook account.
10.1 Forbes
staff writer Laura Shin references Daniel J. Levitin's book, The
Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload,
and lists the 10 tips in overcoming information overload:
1. "Do a brain
dump." This means that a person should clear their mind by writing
everything down their thoughts on paper and then prioritize them into
categories and determine whether the tasks can be completed.
2. "Follow the
two-minute rule." This is a technique where people time-task
themselves.
3. "Clump
together similar tasks."
4. "Don't
multitask."
5."Limit the
distractions of email."
6."Spend only as much
time on decisions, tasks and activities as they are worth."
7. "Take
breaks."
8."Let
yourself daydream."
9."Push
Down Authority."
10.2 We need to
ensure that we don’t fall victim to information overload ourselves. This can be
done by using any or all of the following tactics:
·
Feel free to
ignore information. That
doesn’t mean ignore e-mail from your boss or your clients but do recognize you
can’t consume every drop of information out there and don’t feel guilty for
ignoring some (or a lot) of it.
·
Feel free to
take action without all the facts. We all
do this at times – ask yourself “what’s the worst that can happen?” when you
realize the answer is “probably, not a lot” just take action.
·
Create an
information queue and tackle it on a regular basis. Don’t feel pressured to deal with information
as it arrives; put it to one side and tackle it in a quiet time of the day.
·
Filter
information ruthlessly. Create
filters on your e-mail box and ensure that only priority material catches your
eye during the day. Use filters in your searches to reduce the amount of
information you get on Google. Only deal with what is relevant and/or
important.
·
Delegate
information responsibilities. If you
are part of a team – don’t take responsibility for knowing everything;
encourage people to specialize and then rely on their understanding.
·
Learn to
skim. Most information really
only contains a key point or two – grab those points and move on.
11.The problem of organization
Decision makers
performing complex tasks have little if any excess cognitive capacity.
Narrowing one's attention as a result of the interruption is likely to result
in the loss of information cues, some of which may be relevant to completing
the task. Under these circumstances, performance is likely to deteriorate. As
the number or intensity of the distractions/interruptions increases, the
decision maker's cognitive capacity is exceeded, and performance deteriorates
more severely. In addition to reducing the number of possible cues attended to,
more severe distractions/interruptions may encourage decision makers to use
heuristics, take shortcuts, or opt for a satisficing decision, resulting in
lower decision accuracy.
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 not discern how to use it well in the raw or biased form it is presented to
us.
12.Related terms
·
The
similar term information pollution was coined
by Jakob Nielsen in 2003
·
The
term interruption overload has begun to appear in newspapers
such as the Financial Times.
·
"TL;DR" (too long; didn't read), another
initialism alluding to information overload, this one normally used derisively.
13.Continuous partial attention
·
Linda Stone, a tech writer and consultant,
coined the term continuous partial attention in 1998 to
describe a modern adaptive behavior of continuously dividing one's attention. Stone
has clarified that continuous partial attention is not the same as multi-tasking.
Where multi-tasking is driven by a conscious desire to be productive and
efficient, CPA is an automatic process motivated only by "a desire to be a
live node on the network"or by the willingness to connect and stay
connected, scanning and optimizing opportunities, activities and contacts in an effort to not miss
anything that is going on.
Ack:Wikipaedia.Authors
referred
