The Information Overload Misconception
This is a quote from ‘Spiritual Disciplines For The Christian Life‘ (which I haven’t read) by Donald S. Whitney:
…the amount of information contained in just one weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than a man like Jonathan Edwards would have encountered in his entire life.
This quote, and many variations on it, is being used often during presentations about information technology. I recently heard it in San Francisco at Techcrunch40 and again last week during Web2.0 Expo Berlin. It implies that 200 yeas ago there was a lot less information and people could easily focus on their work. No email, newspapers, RSS feeds and certainly no Britney Spears or Paris Hilton gossip to keep up with. Life used to be so simple. No Information overload to worry about.
But information is more than just text. Information is everywhere and in anything. You fill your head with whatever input you receive.
A farmer walking through the fields on his way home from work would be listening to the wind whistling through leaves on trees. He would hear the buzzing of bees and beetles above his freshly plowed fields. He would see the pattern in the flightpath of a bumble bee communicating to its fellow bumble bees where to find food. And he would get distracted by the aggressive, high pitched, tweezing of a swarm of hornets or maybe he would relax at the droning and throbbing buzz of flies around a drop of cow dung. Every sound, smell or sight would mean something to him and would be collected, processed and taken action on.
Either way, where you and I might see nothing but a field of crops the farmer would see more information than would fit in a whole year of New York Times editions.
Like Art, Information is in the eye of the beholder.
I don’t have a working television in my house and I recently realized that I hardly read the newspaper any more. I am aware of some of the major global developments and by talking to a lot of people I get frequent updates on what is really important. I do read a lot about developments in technology and fields that are interesting for my work. But somehow I thought that more general news, gossip or junk was only distracting me from my work. But then I thought about this quote (used before here) from Thomas Edison:
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
Maybe Britney Spears or Paris Hilton are part of my pile of junk. I need these random bits of information so my imagination can make unexpected connections which will lead to creative solutions for problems I didn’t know I had.
Information Overload is not a problem. I need more information, more junk and more Britney Spears. There is no way to know in advance what information will be useful or trivial. You can never have enough junk in your pile.
So then why do people (Including me) complain about Information Overload?
It is because computers make it all too clear what information you HAVE absorbed and which information you haven’t. The ‘unread’ email’ alerts, new RSS Feeds and ‘to do’ lists demand your attention and won’t go away until you take action. Like a Prickly Poppy these alerts should fade away over time and become more like information in the natural world.
A message in my inbox from 2 months ago which I still haven’t read probably lost its meaning anyway. Why doesn’t it fade it away?
Which brings me to my last quote from an article titled ‘The Computer for the 21st Century‘:
There is more information available at our fingertips during a walk in the woods than in any computer system, yet people find a walk among trees relaxing and computers frustrating. Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods.
[Special thanks to Francisco van Jole for helping me find some of these quotes]
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7 Responses to “The Information Overload Misconception”
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Good story!
Interesting article!
The computer helps and reveals the information absorbed, your article made me remember the five criteria that one could use to look at his data;
1. The recipient. The data has to get to the right person;
2. Time of arrival. It has to get there in a specific timeframe;
3. Authority of/Trust in the originating source;
4. The effort it takes to absorb the information;
5. The ‘resolution’ of the information.
source: http://wafel.net/2007/10/19/on.....load-myth/
Hi Boris,
I agree with your comment “Information Overload is not a problem”. The fact that Google brings a huge list of links to follow can be an advantage…but only if you have some tools that will help to rapidly summarize the essential content.
I’m inovolved in developing such a tool. Context Organizer summarizes web pages and Google search results giving the user an instant overview of the key ideas.
If you were interested to learn more please contact me or better download Context Organizer from Context Discovery and try it out. (http://wwww.contextdiscovery.com). Any comments will be greatly appreciated.
Best regards,
Henry
I totally agree on the pile of junk: you need random input to brake free of the existing patterns and create original solutions to problems.
The point you make on ‘information overload’ might be a bit too simplistic. There seems to be different levels of information. Information has a certain ‘density’, like a cloud of solar gaz. The humming of a nightingale is a very specific piece of information. The humming of ten different birds would drive the farmer nuts (‘information overload’). Luckily, the human brain invented something incredible valuable: concepts. So the farmer processes the sounds as ‘bird sounds’ (concept) and at a higher level his journey through the fields is perceived as ‘sounds of nature’ (higher concept). Humans can process in split seconds tons of information through use of these concepts. The higher the concept, the more abstract the ‘information’ becomes, i.e. the more dense. So we do handle more information through the use of abstract concepts. But the more abstract the concepts become, the more ‘detached’ we become of the reality of the information. In other words, we lose the understanding between information and what it stands for. There is no information overload. Only a sense of loss.
The rss, unread e-mail and other clutter has not so much to do with information. It’s due to the ‘fragmentation of life’. We tend to do more things at once (e-mailing, making phone call, watch video, listen to radio). We spread our attention. We spread our identity (you no longer belong to a single group of people, instead you create an identity basket of different subgroups). Identity is like an mp3 you can only download through multiple peer-to-peer users. So is information.
I like the idea of stuff fading away… beautifull human interaction and interface idea. Bytheway I remember an artist friend from my vocal singing teacher when I was about 10 in 1966. He told me an amazing story at that time: He did not listen to the radio, had no tv, never read newspapers and got updated with the real important news at the grocery store at the corner of the street where he bought his piece of Sunlight soap with which he cleaned the dishes, bathed himself and did his laundry. Lifehacking avant la lettre!
@Huub: that is a beautiful story!
@Hugo: thanks for the long and insightful comment. Deserves a blog post of its own.