My own background as a hi-tech cube dweller biases my perception of Information Overload to the aspect that is most immediately painful to engineers and managers in the industry: Email Overload. Indeed, the impact of the scores or hundreds of incoming message these folks receive daily is so painful that they’re seldom aware of the second major kind of overload that is complementary to email: Interruptions, the distracting beeps, bleeps and squawks of mobile phones, Blackberries, and incoming email. In fact, as we’ve computed at Intel, Interruptions are a bigger time sink than email; but they don’t accumulate like mail does, which is shy they are less visible to their victims.
And then there are other kinds of Information Overload, and when I lecture or blog about “my” kind I get comments from people who expected other kinds. For instance, there’s the problem of ability to keep up with published knowledge, typically couched in terms of the medical doctors who can’t keep up with all the new papers published in their field. The 20th century saw the switch from the earlier model of the scientist, the one who knew everything there was to know in all domains, to the specialist who studies only a single narrow field; in the 21st century even a single field is too much. Certainly a problem, especially if you’re the patient with the rare condition whose diagnosis sits at the bottom of the pile of unread journals on your physician’s shelf…
Search for “Information Overload” on Twitter – a fascinating place to search for anything – and you see glimpses of all the other types of IO, which afflict other types of people, from school kids to business people to students to techies… for instance,
“Too much studying may result in an acute case of information overload” “information overload! if only my head has a USB port! i would love it! Hehe” “Information overload today, massive amounts of baseball and football… I need more tv’s!” “Intense Anime information overload!” “Email overload; while reading mail on laptop, phone buzzes to deliver more mail!” “headache. information overload (4 hrs of lecture back to back, 1 10-min break).” “Information Overload (RSS, Emails, Social Media, going insane!)”
So, for different people IO may mean too many lectures, too much homework, too many TV channels, Social media… rather different phenomena with the same name. And while I will be writing here mostly about the Email/Interruptions kind, I look forward to also discussing some of the others.
Meanwhile, if you have thoughts about a kind of IO you want me to discuss, share it in the comments and we’ll see!
My own background as a hi-tech cube dweller biases my perception of Information Overload to the aspect that is most immediately painful to engineers and managers in the industry: Email Overload. Indeed, the impact of the scores or hundreds of incoming message these folks receive daily is so painful that they’re seldom aware of the second major kind of overload that is complementary to email: Interruptions, the distracting beeps, bleeps and squawks of mobile phones, Blackberries, and incoming email. In fact, as we’ve computed at Intel, Interruptions are a bigger time sink than email; but they don’t accumulate like mail does, which is shy they are less visible to their victims.
And then there are other kinds of Information Overload, and when I lecture or blog about “my” kind I get comments from people who expected other kinds. For instance, there’s the problem of ability to keep up with published knowledge, typically couched in terms of the medical doctors who can’t keep up with all the new papers published in their field. The 20th century saw the switch from the earlier model of the scientist, the one who knew everything there was to know in all domains, to the specialist who studies only a single narrow field; in the 21st century even a single field is too much. Certainly a problem, especially if you’re the patient with the rare condition whose diagnosis sits at the bottom of the pile of unread journals on your physician’s shelf…
Search for “Information Overload” on Twitter – a fascinating place to search for anything – and you see glimpses of all the other types of IO, which afflict other types of people, from school kids to business people to students to techies… for instance,
“Too much studying may result in an acute case of information overload”
“information overload! if only my head has a USB port! i would love it! Hehe”
“Information overload today, massive amounts of baseball and football… I need more tv’s!”
“Intense Anime information overload!
“Email overload; while reading mail on laptop, phone buzzes to deliver more mail!”
“headache. information overload (4 hrs of lecture back to back, 1 10-min break).”
“Information Overload (RSS, Emails, Social Media, going insane!)”
So, for different people IO may mean too many lectures, too much homework, too many TV channels, Social media… rather different phenomena with the same name. And while I will be writing here mostly about the Email/Interruptions kind, I look forward to also discussing some of the others.
Meanwhile, if you have thoughts about a kind of IO you want me to discuss, share it in the comments and we’ll see!
