Every year in October Basex, a New York based analyst company that is very active in the war on Info Overload, announces the observance of the worldwide Information Overload Awareness Day. This holiday, which is sponsored by our Information Overload Research Group, may not cure the problem that is exacting a growing toll on the effectiveness and sanity of knowledge workers worldwide, but it is a way to give some reach to the message that something needs to be done about it!
This year the day is Thursday, Oct. 20, and I urge you to devote some time during that day to consider how you can reduce the overload you suffer and the one you create for others – and to disseminate this call for action through your own social channels. If we all try to reduce the overload for those around us, we will make the world a better place.
Happy IOAD, folks!
WHAT IF INFORMATION OVERLOAD DOES NOT EXIST?
The core assumption behind information overload is that the information we want is the same as the information we need or like. Therefore, we cannot with good reason cut back on the information we want, because it reflects stuff that is important to us. Hence, thanks to the web we are overloaded with needed information that we can’t help wanting. However, from the perspective of contemporary affective neuroscience, wanting and liking are NOT the same thing, and are governed by entirely different neural processes. Thus, what we want is different from what we need because wanting and liking represent distinctive neurological events. Therefore, the key underlying premise of information overload that everything we want is the same as everything we need is based on cognitive principles that have no basis in neural reality, and the concept of information overload must therefore be abandoned.
The linked article questions the concept of information overload by challenging this most elementary underlying assumption. Based on the work of the distinguished neuropsychologist Kent Berridge of the University of Michigan (who also vetted and endorsed it), it is simple, short, and uses a Boston Red Sox title run to make its very radical point. Hope you ‘like’ it or at the very least the Red Sox!
http://mezmer.blogspot.com/2012/02/searching-for-red-stockings-myth-of.html