What Information Overload?
Over the last few months I keep noticing discussions about so-called “problems” of the web that aren’t really affecting anyone. I’ve had whole conversations with people about how something like the addition of a score has effected the quality of posts on Tumblr only to stop and realize that I was arguing for something I haven’t experienced.
Information overload falls perfectly into this bucket. It’s a huge topic on the web, partly because it’s a huge topic off the web: Newspapers and magazines love covering it (probably because they’re the antidote). Anyway, New York Magazine has some type of story on the subject (which I may or may not read). The article has the following quote by an economist named Herbert Simon: “What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
To which the always insightful (and never afraid to take the opposite position) Scott Rafer responded, “Information overload only occurs when the structure of the information being offered to you isn’t intuitive for you. It’s not the amount of information; it’s that you’re stuck in a meta-rut due to age, attitude, or lousy intellectual environment.” He’s right. I don’t feel like there’s too much information out there. I love the abundance. I live on the abundance. Sure, I miss stuff, but I always missed stuff and so did everyone else.
Hi, I'm 
Over the summer, someone asked me how I can keep track of all the digital information – music, RSS feeds, Tweets, iChat, and whatever file I am working on – at once.
I said, “Take a second to think about everything you are experiencing right now. You’re listening to me, about three other conversations going on around us, the air conditioning. You’re seeing me, my desk, the carpet, the wall, the wall art, out the window, the trees. You’re feeling the air around you, the clothes on your body, the floor beneath your feet. You’re smelling the dust from the vents and the coffee in this cup. If you tried to explain all that to someone who was deaf and blind, they’d probably say the same thing. ‘How my god, how do you process it all?’ And the answer is, ‘You just adapt. You learn how to decipher what’s important and what’s not and how to focus and refocus on things throughout the day.’”
I’m not normally that eloquent, so I assume I’d either thought of or heard that explanation before. But I can’t remember when or where.
I heard a great Buddhist story once. The student asks the master how he managed to hear a tiny bird singing softly at the window and the master replied, “The real question is, ‘How is it that you did not?’”
On the contrary, I think information overload is real. You’re right that an abundance of information isn’t new, but I do find it overwhelming since what I ignore is constantly thrust in my face by the hundreds of RSS feeds I skip each day, and links in blog posts like this one that I choose not to read.
I’ll admit that knowing the information exists, knowing that it’s so easily accessible, and knowing that others dedicate the time to consume it is an unsettling feeling at times. Whether or not we call that feeling or condition “information overload” might be a different discussion.
I don’t think there is actually a big difference between what Simon (who, by the way, won the Nobel and was a brilliant theorists of organizations/institutions) said and what others, like Matt above, are saying in reaction. Simon is simply pointing out the economics behind information consumption. The end of his quote provides a reasonable prescription: “a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
To me, this sounds like he is saying we will need to adapt to the exponential increase in information and find ways to organize the information to better separate signal from noise. How we do that may differ by individual, but it will need to be done. We all organize the information we consume using different tools–RSS feeds being just one example.
The adaptation won’t just happen magically–we take specific steps (if not always consciously) to organize how we consume data. Tyler Cowen’s recent book, Create Your Own Economy, explores this in a really interesting way.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between information (and the ongoing increases in the volume that we’re exposed to) and attention. Clay Shirky says “it’s not information overload, it’s filter failure”, which I think is exactly right.
I think the issue is not information overload or information abundance, but how we deal with it psychologically. I’m learning to become more comfortable with serendipity, and assuming that if I check the sources I trust, the stuff that I should be reading will make its way to me. So far, it seems to be working :)
I think the real issue isn’t so much information overload or information abundance as it is the way we deal with it psychologically. I’ve learned to be more comfortable with serendipity, which isn’t easy for me. I’m the type to read my magazines cover to cover and to prefer folders over search because I’m afraid that I might be missing something if I search. But gradually I’ve learned to trust that the really good stuff will bubble its way to the surface and find me, and so far, it seems to be working.
Hi Noah
People of a certain age (and that includes me) grew up in a time of information scarcity. We hunted for things that interested us or fed our interests. So every morsel was valuable, to be hoarded and treasured.
Later generations have grown up with abundance. There’s not much you can’t get with the flick of a “find” button.
Old habits die hard. I continually battle urges to add feeds, clip things for later, build folders of “potentially useful” stuff, form collections based on some pattern I see and finish everything on my plate like a good boy.
Lots of research has noticed that “youngsters” don’t have that same compulsion. If they ever need something they have faith that they’ll easily find it.
I suspect a lot of the articles on info overload are written by people of my generation.
Perhaps it’s not about filters or curation, perhaps it’s about attitude to information.
=) Marc
The problem with the ‘too much information’ argument is that it emphasizes information abundance while ignoring the ways this information is categorized, organized, and demonstrated. Sheer availability of information we get from others, in itself, does not make our decision-making possible: if anything, it can only hamper it due to too much choice. Rather, it is the way this information is communicated in digital media that turns it into a resource for decision-making.
And to Shirky’s “filter failure” point, which I don’t think really explains anything: The challenge, in fact, is to shift the perspective from a mere plurality of information sources as factors in decision-making towards the complexity of the situation as a decision-making resource.
(that’s from my dissertation, pardon the language).
A side note: Herbert Simon is most famous as organizational theorist and one of the founders of systems theory (and not as an economist).
I have to assume that the Internet isn’t the only factor contributing to info overload, if in fact there is such a thing, which there could be in some way, shape, form, etc. Some people are just more sensitive to their environment. In my case, I find constant media messaging scary on some level, and find it even scarier that a lot of kids my age seem not necessarily to block it out, but to consume it very passively and thus become very passive about the environment they live in, unquestioning of the constant information they’re receiving. TVs in bars is an example of this. Like when sometimes there’s a DJ, too, and the noise is deafening, but then plus there’s news, sports, and intermittent commercials all occurring simultaneously, and I think if you’re not questioning it on some level then you’re probably simply too trusting of the system we’ve got. Not that there aren’t great benefits to so much info, but I find that to have a sanctuary from it is to make very tough personal decisions.