Information overload
[9] 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.
Psychologist George Armitage Miller was very influential in this regard, proposing that people can process about seven chunks of information at a time.
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.
Renaissance humanists always had a desire to preserve their writings and observations,[14] 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.
As a result of lowering production costs, generation of printed materials ranging from pamphlets, manuscripts to books were made available to the average person.
Aside from printing books and passage recording, encyclopedias and alphabetical indexes were introduced, enabling people to save and bookmark information for retrieval.
[18] 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.
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.
[citation needed] In the second half of the 20th century, advances in computer and information technology led to the creation of the Internet.
[24] As the world moves into a new era of globalization, an increasing number of people connect to the internet to conduct their own research[25] and are given the ability to contribute to publicly accessible data.
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.
One concern in this field is that massive amounts of information can be distracting and negatively impact productivity and decision-making and cognitive control.
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.
[33] In January 2011, Eve Tahmincioglu, a writer for NBC News, wrote an article titled "It's Time to Deal With That Overflowing Inbox".
Quoted in the article, workplace productivity expert Marsha Egan stated that people need to differentiate between working on email and sorting through it.
"[34] 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 email 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".
However, information published online may not always be reliable, due to the lack of authority-approval or a compulsory accuracy check before publication.
[citation needed] 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.
The 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.
"[39] Social media are applications and websites with an online community where users create and share content with each other, and it adds to the problem of information overload because so many people have access to it.
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.
[45][46][47] In general, overload coping strategy consists of two excluding (ignoring and filtering) and two including (customizing and saving) approaches.
Authors who have taken this view include graphic artist and architect Richard Saul Wurman and statistician and cognitive scientist Edward Tufte.
[55] Tufte primarily focuses on quantitative information and explores ways to organize large complex datasets visually to facilitate clear thinking.
[57] In a study conducted by Soucek and Moser (2010),[58] they investigated what impact a training intervention on how to cope with information overload would have on employees.
They found that the training intervention did have a positive impact on IO, especially on those who struggled with work impairment and media usage, and employees who had a higher amount of incoming emails.
[58] Recent research suggests that an "attention economy" of sorts will naturally emerge from information overload,[59] allowing Internet users greater control over their online experience with particular regard to communication mediums such as email and instant messaging.
