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Rethinking Information Overload

Posted January 05, 2016 12:00 AM by Hannes

A few summers ago my decade-old, rusted-through lawnmower finally bit the dust in the middle of the first mow of the season. At Home Depot, I picked out a model from a brand I'd known to be reliable in the past and happily drove it home. After I'd lugged it to the garage but before opening the box, I decided to read a few online reviews to confirm the fact that I'd chosen a solid machine.

Of course, I found the opposite. A full 15% of reviewers had their starters quit on only the tenth start or so. The manufacturer repeatedly claimed that worn drive wheels were not under warranty. The blade sucked. They're "just not made like they used to be." Three stars out of five. Sufficiently horrified and feeling like an idiot, I lugged it back to the store and exchanged it for one that had a marginally better rating and supposedly less-severe issues. My almost-computer-illiterate father-in-law was amused by this exchange and asked me: "Why don't you just keep it and ignore the reviews instead of breaking your back exchanging it? You're probably in the 85% of those whose starters won't quit."

I admit it's a good question, and it raises bigger ones. How much good does a load of additional information really do? It might eliminate uncertainty but does it also increase neuroticism and fear of failure and mistakes? Information overload is far from a new concept, but is it still legit to gripe about it?

The aspect of info overload that I often fail to consider is that, in many ways, we've been in this position many times before. We all know the revolutionary effects of Gutenberg's printing press, but consider that the mid-15th century was the first time a human could come in contact with more printed material than he or she could consume in a lifetime. Maybe the first instance of overload as we know it? And replication technologies like carbon paper and photocopying made the proliferation of existing information that much easier and cheaper. Obviously, the digital revolution had the greatest effect, in that our information now takes up zero space and can be produced and reproduced at almost no cost.

Researchers continue to share data (more information!) about the staggering costs of information overload. Linda Stone posits that modern knowledge workers operate (poorly) at "continuous partial attention," dealing with email and social network interruptions on a continuous basis. She also found that people unconsciously suspend breathing when checking their email, a phenomenon she calls "email apnea." Studies have found that overload and email interruptions result in lower functional IQ for employees and over a trillion dollars in lost productivity for the US economy as a whole.

Although these days it's bandied about as both a corporate and mental-health buzzword, the practice of mindfulness seems to be an effective technique for combating information overload. Asking oneself "Where does my attention need to be right now?" is a good start. Alan Jacobs, one of my favorite writers on technology and culture, points out that in our modern world "paying attention" is not a metaphor: it's "an economic exercise, an exchange with uncertain results." Jacobs' statement that "we should evaluate our investments of attention at least as carefully and critically as our investments of money" is a profound one in this age of information onslaught.

Information overload is not likely to go away, and will likely get worse. Maybe in the future those who "win" at work and life will be those with manic attention spans, who can switch gears within seconds and consume more information as a result. The whole discussion reminds me of an adage I frequently hear from fellow working parents of young children: "I'm doing too much, and I'm not doing any of it well."

Image credit: Beth Kanter / CC BY 2.0

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#1

Re: Rethinking Information Overload

01/05/2016 7:50 AM

And then there is the issue of "Paid for reviews".

http://fortune.com/2015/10/19/amazon-fake-reviews/

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#2

Re: Rethinking Information Overload

01/06/2016 12:59 AM

You might also want to consider the source of some of the information, and the relevance to ypur inquiry.

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Re: Rethinking Information Overload

01/06/2016 9:17 AM

Key words, "consider the source". User reviews are based on personal use(unless of course they are "paid" - #1) and one can never know if the user was using the item for what it was intended, did any required PM, or maybe was just having a bad day. The only "user reviews" I consider are ones that are from people that I actually know, and of course, trust.

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#3

Re: Rethinking Information Overload

01/06/2016 4:02 AM

It's unfortunate that, if someone has a bad experience with anything, it's very easy now to have an on-line rant to vent your feelings. If the experience is a good one, we don't always bother to report that so there is a greater likelihood of bad reviews appearing. Taking that into account, your 15% bad reviews is not too off-putting.

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#5
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Re: Rethinking Information Overload

01/06/2016 5:20 PM

I would add the % of bad review would make me think very carefully about something as expensive as a lawn mower. Something costing $10 wouldn't bother me as much if the item failed.

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#6

Re: Rethinking Information Overload

01/06/2016 7:15 PM

It's hard to think of a subject more central and important than this one.

Though modern communications are commonplace, this is still "early days" in the grand scheme.

The individual's ability to critically assess information and evaluate it needs to evolve to do us all any good, seems to me.

A current local news item has it that a professor teaching a course in just such individual information input education has been barred from teaching it (name=Persinger).

Why? Politics.

Our Western Civilization isn't doing itself any favours with this stuff.

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#7

Re: Rethinking Information Overload

01/12/2016 10:44 AM

This discussion reminded me of satisficing and more particularly of the concept of rational ignorance in the context of decision-making. This is the Wikipedia definition of rational ignorance:

Rational ignorance is refraining from acquiring knowledge when the cost of educating oneself on an issue exceeds the potential benefit that the knowledge would provide.

The more choices, and the more complex the choices, the less we want to think through them. All of us have developed our own decision-making heuristics so we can cope with this onslaught of data points. I have my mental Rolodex of experts -- like Consumer Reports and my mother -- that I trust for decision-making assistance. Otherwise I'd be like Michael Palin in a long-ago Monty Python skit, "My brain hurts" when I'm faced with a glut of information.

Too much info is as bad, or worse, than not enough, right?

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