Do you think we suffer from information overload?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon for a couple of weeks now, and it coalesced around Heath Ledger’s death. Everybody was speculating on who what when where and why, even though it was going to be weeks before anybody knew anything. Wikipedia had that he died of a heroin overdose mere minutes after the news broke, but whether that was someone trolling or someone posting gossip I don’t know. I believe the information has since been removed.

With access to instant news, via the radio, all-news channels, and the internet, do you find yourself making snap decisions about issues? Do you find yourself having to have an opinion about a news snippet you hear in order to feel that you can intelligently discuss it?

Even here on the boards, I’ve noticed (and done it myself) threads started about breaking news, and speculation runs rampant, when in the light of later events, it makes me feel slightly ridiculous.

I’ve caught myself at work doing it…someone makes a decision about something, I used to run my tail off trying to implement it, only to find out if I’d waited and done a little bit more research, the outcome would have been much different. I take the time now to investigate the matter and make sure I have all the facts before I go crazy.

I mentioned this to Ivylad…that it seems that more and more we are asked to react RIGHT NOW to information, rather than sitting back and trying to digest the situation and wait for more facts.

Maybe this is GD, maybe this is more MPSIMS, but do you feel the need to react to breaking news more quickly, rather than sitting back and waiting for all the facts to come in? It’s like the news organizations have to beat each other to break the “news” first, and with the dramatic music cues we’re supposed to drop everything and OMG! listen to the “news.” I remember during the Olympics in 2002 when the news “broke” that the US basketball team wasn’t going to make it to the finals. ABC broke into the radio show, with the dramatic “breaking news” music, and since this was fairly close to Sept 11 my heart started racing. Surely, this was “news” that could have waited for the next news break?

Sorry for the rambling…I’m not sure I’ve expressed what I’m trying to say adequately. Sometimes I just wish we could take a breather from all the “information,” but then, you run the risk of being labeled “uninformed.”

2

I know exactly what you’re getting at. Actually, I don’t, I just looked it up on Wikipedia: Information overload - Wikipedia

:D,

3

The younger generation Y’s are a near complete digital information generation. The faster, smaller, more powerful anything is the “better” it feels inside, this is due in no small part to the information age.

As for information overload? I think some in the older population can get overloaded quite quickly with all that is out there. Case in point, the other day we hired a young guy (21) right out of college to do some of our website administration. I was in my office asking a coworker where the hell does route 1 connect to the Rhode Island rt.4 I’ve got a meeting there in 30 minutes and I wasn’t sure how to get there. I was asking a real person if they knew…He got on google maps and found it in under a minute and came into my office with a print out. Happy but not amazed, it dawned on me that he thought of using an online tool [a digital tool] before asking a human being. And it worked.

I guess that’s your answer for me…overload? maybe not, faster digital human thinking, probably.

4

Who you calling old? Why, I used mapquest just the other day! Now, gerrrof my lawn! :smiley:

I would submit there’s a difference between tools and information. I know the internet has changed the way we do research…both my son and my daughter now do part of their homework assignments on line. My son, at college, has a cell phone, but both he and his sister have webcams on their laptops, and we’re able to converse via the internet and not burn up cell phone minutes.

I do see what you’re saying about becoming more isolated…I’ve had IM chats with people who sit two cubes away from me, instead of you know…actually getting up, walking over and talking to them* in person*.

5

Us curmudgeons should band together! :slight_smile:

6

Sometimes I feel the information overload the other way, too. Especially at work. If there is a current issue, there’s a pressure to get “everything” (whatever that means) that is online before making a decision. I’ve got some people in the office checking up on 43 sites … not realizing that 40 of them are running the same AP feed (and I don’t know why they don’t get it, they are smart people who would figure that out right away if looking at a bunch of actual, printed newspapers running the same AP story) and others who are paying the same amount of attention to, for example, the BBC news site and some random guy’s blog. The information-gathering phase never ends … and there is a general attitude of surprise when, after the fact, a concern is raised about why the office seemed to take a long time to respond. Which makes me pretty much want to put my own eyes out with a pair of scissors.

7

I think we suffer from pseudoinformation overload. ≥95% of the content thrown at us is the product of an overdeveloped sales and marketing juggernaut, most of it trying to generate more return while giving less value. And yes, this includes political coverage and commentary.

The situation is kept in place by our learned instinct to save time, to react rather than think critically, and to stick to the obvious, the quick summary, the sound and thought bite. Commoditize those values and they’ll take over. It’s getting hard to even imagine getting our news and views in another way.

8

I like this is more a generational gap than anything having to do with information overload.

Getting directions to a place is an involved process that usually involves the person you ask stumbling over the words to convey the correct directions as they go over the route in their head. Unless they know the route very well, Yahoo Maps will always give a better and faster result.

And older people forget that because asking someone is how directions were done until a few years ago.

9

They are smart people, though, in one way. Not to get all McLuhan on you here, but they know that the act of gathering the info is as important, if not more so, than the info itself. The 'tubes may not actually have 43x more info than the morning papers, but they have the potential to, and scanning those 43 sites shows one’s dedication, diligence, and fitness in the info age.

It’s makework, is what I’m getting at. And the speedup that follows is as much a part of the nature of the workplace as makework is. Do more faster—what is needful or useful is not ours to decide. :dubious:

10

It’s not just the Internet. Part of the perceived “information overload” also comes from cable television and the expansion of broadcast media into 24-hour schedules instead of 12- or 18-hour schedules. When you’ve got 24 hours to fill, everything becomes significant, whether or not any given story actually is. And when everything is important, nothing is.

IMNSHO, this is just a form of agenda-setting, in which the media decides what is important, and since this is the steady diet we’re fed, we go along with it. It doesn’t matter that the information we receive is unimportant, we place a higher value on it because it’s what we know. Agenda-setting theory assumes that media users are intelligent and able to think critically about what they’re getting, but we all know that that’s rarely the case. So we assume that Natalee Holloway is the most important kidnapping/murder since the Lindbergh Baby because that’s what’s on TV.

Anyone who is really interested in this topic should read Culture of Fear by Barry Glassner. It’s a well-written and clear-eyed study of media coverage and how it spreads fear.

Robin

11

I think **Robyn **makes a good point…we think we’re informed because we watch the news or check out Drudge or whatever news site hits our fancy. But the thing is, we’re not necessarily getting the whole story…just what the news outlet feels is pertinent to our shortened attention span. But a lot of the time, there’s more to the story, but how many of us are going to take the time to go digging for it? We’re going to cut and paste links from wherever and call it good. And like it or not, there are very few unbiased (or perceived unbiased) media outlets out there.

12

I just posted about this in another thread. There’s lots of other stuff, so I’ll just post the relevant part.

Robin

13

It’s N-A-S, the black shakes, man!

14

I feel this way specifically in regards to the candidates. I hear so much about them that I start to tune it all out. I think it odd that I may be less informed because of too much information.

15

And there are third tier/party candidates, that if they could get their message out, could make people think twice about voting either D or R. But unless you have a buttload of money, a la Nader, you aren’t going to be able to muscle your way in front of the cameras.

16

Really good point. IMO, the manner in which info is presented makes it all the more difficult to discern between that which is useful or valuable, as opposed to that which is merely eye-catching or distracting.

Aside: we just had a marathon work meeting at which one topic was how to encrypt material on our flashdrives. I brought down the house when I inquired whether the same requirements applied to the floppy discs I used. Hell, I’ve seen enough technologies come and go. My computers at work and at home still use floppies, and they work just fine for my purposes. I figure that if I stick with them until I get a new computer at work or buy a new one at home, storage devices might have progressed to something beyond flashdrives, such that I can avoid learning an entire technological step.

As might be expected, after the meeting a steady stream of folks have been stopping by to ask if they can play some Atari, borrow some punch cards, etc. Ho-ho-fucking-ho! :stuck_out_tongue:

17

I think some people suffer from overload because they rely on push technologies (the vendor sends you the information) rather than pull technologies (you go out and get it.) The way I deal with it is by rationing my time, the one thing that isn’t expanding. It forces you to make judgments on what input to accept. Is watching TV about the latest blond murder victim better than reading, writing, or visiting the Dope? Hell no, so I’m not even tempted.

I realized this when I had kids, and the time for me became time for them. Now I have more time, I’m more careful with it.

Filters are going to be more and more important. Book reviews and publishers are never going to go away, even when all books are purely digital, because you will never be able to even glance at all that is out there. So, we will suffer until we all figure out how to filter stuff, which should be taught in school. We don’t need to learn how to find information any more, we need to learn how to ignore garbage passing as information.

18

Barraged is how I feel some days. It’s not enough to have 24hr/day news channels, they also have to be running tickers across the bottom, so I’m getting double the news. When I sit back to look at what I’ve just been bombarded with, I usually decide that a huge portion of it is total fluff, and I would be just as happy / well off if I’d never heard it.

Did I ever need hours of TV watching OJ Simpson’s slow motion car chase? Do I really care which rehab program Britney Spears is checked into? Would a single page of Super Tuesday primary/caucus results the next morning be more useful then 8 stations with blow by blow coverage?

I’ve pretty much given up on “live” news (TV, most radio, some internet) because it’s either filled with stuff that just doesn’t effect my life, or it’s 80% speculation designed to fill time until the final results are in.

19

But filters are not taught in school, although media literacy should be taught. That takes time away from what’s on the standardized tests and keeps kids from learning to be good consumers. :rolleyes:

Robin

20

You can become overloaded with push information, but I find myself overloaded with Internet content. There’s only so much you can keep up with each day. I have message boards for my vehicles, Straight Dope, Digg, Fark.com, my blog, the list goes on and on. You easily spend an hour each day on all of those sites. Plus regular local and national news. Time Magazine. Popular Mechanics. The newspaper. Too much information.