As early as the 3rd or 4th century BC, people regarded information overload with disapproval. Information overload has been documented throughout periods where advances in technology have increased a production of information. What was once a term grounded in cognitive psychology has evolved into a rich metaphor used outside the world of academia. In his abstract, Kazi Mostak Gausul Hoq commented that people often experience an "information glut" whenever they struggle with locating information from print, online, or digital sources. In the internet age, the term "information overload" has evolved into phrases such as "information glut", "data smog", and "data glut" ( Data Smog, Shenk, 1997). It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes. ![]() Long before that, the concept was introduced by Diderot, although it was not by the term "information overload":Īs long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. Miller says that under overload conditions, people become confused and are likely to make poorer decisions based on the information they have received as opposed to making informed ones.Ī quite early example of the term "information overload" can be found in an article by Jacob Jacoby, Donald Speller and Carol Kohn Berning, who conducted an experiment on 192 housewives which was said to confirm the hypothesis that more information about brands would lead to poorer decision making. Psychologist George Armitage Miller was very influential in this regard, proposing that people can process about seven chunks of information at a time. Psychologists have recognized for many years that humans have a limited capacity to store current information in memory. The social psychologist Stanley Milgram (1933–1984) later used the concept of information overload to explain bystander behavior. One of the first social scientists to notice the negative effects of information overload was the sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918), who hypothesized that the overload of sensations in the modern urban world caused city dwellers to become jaded and interfered with their ability to react to new situations. In the age of connective digital technologies, informatics, the Internet culture (or the digital culture), information overload is associated with over-exposure, excessive viewing of information, and input abundance of information and data.Įven though information overload is linked to digital cultures and technologies, Ann Blair notes that the term itself predates modern technologies, as indications of information overload were apparent when humans began collecting manuscripts, collecting, recording, and preserving information. Longstanding technological factors have been further intensified by the rise of social media and the attention economy, which facilitates attention theft. The advent of modern information technology has been a primary driver of information overload on multiple fronts: in quantity produced, ease of dissemination, and breadth of the audience reached. He states that when a decision-maker is given many sets of information, such as complexity, amount, and contradiction, the quality of its decision is decreased because of the individual's limitation of scarce resources to process all the information and optimally make the best decision. In a newer definition, Roetzel (2019) focuses on time and resources aspects. (1999) said that if input exceeds the processing capacity, information overload occurs, which is likely to reduce the quality of the decisions. The term "information overload" was first used as early as 1962 by scholars in management and information studies, including in Bertram Gross' 1964 book, The Managing of Organizations, and was further popularized by Alvin Toffler in his bestselling 1970 book Future Shock. Information overload (also known as infobesity, infoxication, information anxiety, and information explosion ) is the difficulty in understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information (TMI) about that issue, and is generally associated with the excessive quantity of daily information. ![]() Decision making with too much information
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