Information overload
September 23, 2009 by admin
Filed under Career News and Advice
Vogue editor Anna Wintour types on her BlackBerry while waiting for a show to begin at London fashion week. Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images
Information overload dates back to Johannes Gutenberg. His invention of movable type led to a proliferation of printed matter that quickly exceeded what a single human mind could absorb in a lifetime. Later technologies – from carbon paper to the photocopier – made replicating existing information even easier. And once information was digitised, documents could be copied in limitless numbers at virtually no cost.
Digitising content also removed barriers to another activity first made possible by the printing press: publishing new information. No longer restricted by centuries-old production and distribution costs, anyone can be a publisher today. In fact, a lot of new information – personalised recommendations from Amazon, for instance – is “published” and distributed without any active human input.
With the information floodgates open, content rushes at us in countless formats: text messages and tweets on our mobile phones. Facebook friend alerts and voicemail on our BlackBerrys. Instant messages and direct-marketing sales pitches (no longer limited by the cost of postage) on our desktop computers. Not to mention the ultimate killer app: email. (I, for one, have nearly expired during futile efforts to keep up with it.)
Meanwhile, we are drawn toward information that in the past didn’t exist or that we didn’t have access to but, now that it’s available, we dare not ignore. Online research reports and industry data. Blogs written by colleagues or by executives at rival companies. Wikis and discussion forums on topics we’re following. The corporate intranet. The latest banal musings of friends in our social networks.
Researchers now say that the stress of not being able to process information as fast as it arrives – combined with the personal and social expectation that, say, you will answer every email – can deplete and demoralise you. Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist and expert on attention-deficit disorders, argues that the modern workplace induces what he calls “attention deficit trait”, with characteristics similar to those of the genetically based disorder. Author Linda Stone, who coined the term “continuous partial attention” to describe the mental state of today’s knowledge workers, says she’s now noticing – get this – “email apnea”: the unconscious suspension of regular and steady breathing when you tackle your email.
There are even claims that the relentless cascade of information lowers people’s intelligence. A few years ago, a study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard reported that the IQ scores of knowledge workers distracted by email and phone calls fell from their normal level by an average of 10 points – twice the decline recorded for those smoking marijuana, several commentators wryly noted.
Of course, not everyone feels overwhelmed by the torrent of information. Some are stimulated by it. But that raises the spectre of (cue scary music) information addiction. According to a 2008 AOL survey of 4,000 email users in the US, 46% were “hooked” on email. Nearly 60% of everyone surveyed had checked email in the bathroom, 15% checked it in church, and 11% had hidden the fact that they were checking it from a spouse or other family member.
The tendency of always-available information to blur the boundaries between work and home can affect our personal lives in unexpected ways. Consider the recently reported phenomenon of (cue really scary music) BlackBerry orphans: children who desperately fight to regain their parents’ attention from the devices – in at least one reported case, by flushing a BlackBerry down the toilet.
Most organisations unknowingly pay a high price as iniduals struggle to manage the information glut. For one thing, productive time is lost as employees deal with information of limited value. In the case of email, effective spam filters have reduced this problem. Still, a survey of 2,300 Intel employees revealed that people judge nearly one third of the messages they receive to be unnecessary. Given that those same employees spend about two hours a day processing email (employees surveyed received an average of 350 messages a week, executives up to 300 a day), a serious amount of time is clearly being wasted.
“Many companies are still in denial about the problem,” says Nathan Zeldes, a former Intel senior engineer who oversaw the study. “And though people suffer, they don’t fight back, because communication is supposed to be good for you.” Zeldes is …
Read the original article at Guardian
