question?

Too Much Information?

The perception that the internet spawns vast amounts of junk is often used as an excuse for not adopting new technology and new ways of doing business. Here we suggest the solution to the productivity paradox lies in better use of the offending technology.

Information Pollution

It is true that much online content is the savage banality of personal status updates, blogs, tweets and other shares. The vast majority of want gets posted is harmlessly ignored on cheap disk space. Out of the tiny minority that dose get attention and is perpetuated there is no guarantee of quality, accuracy or decency, to put it mildly. Jacob Nielsen regards this as a contamination of our information supply, and has labelled it Information Pollution . Whilst Nielsen was speaking about a corporate verbosity, we could add spam as an obvious pollutant. Spam in all its various guises is often computer generated semi-gibberish stuffed full of keywords and bogus links in the hope of hooking some fool. It exists in truly monstrous quantities. All these attempts to steal our attention result in an information overload.

Information Overload

Cognitive Overload

Alvin Toffler predicted Information Overload in his 1970 book "Future Shock". When he wrote of the individual "plunged into a fast and irregularly changing situation or a novelty-loaded context" and how "... his predictive accuracy plummets. He can no longer make the reasonably correct assessments on which rational behaviour is dependent" . More recently Nicholas Carr described it thus.

This condition of "cognitive overload" results in diminished information retaining ability and failing to connect remembrances to experiences stored in the long-term memory, leaving thoughts "thin and scattered" .

Academic Neil Fleming however dismisses the notion that the internet has created new age of Information Overload. Believing there has always been more information available than the individual can handle. Describing the intellectual coping strategy of "forage and search" as one applicable then as is now.

Exponential growth in information ceases to be a problem once it passed my ability to cope with it all. The skills then are selection, prioritizing and constructing just as they were before.

Wherever a new invention or not there is a limit to what our brains can handle. Cognitive science has demonstrated that the short term, or working memory is small and fragile, dealing only in small chunks. Get interrupted and it empties . And learning, the storing of concepts and procedures to the long term memory, is impeded by distraction and extraneous detail, working best by the spacing out of these digestible chunks.

Productivity paradox

The blame for the apparent productivity paradox of information technology is, to some extent business culture. Pressure to make purely internal information look good results excesses, time consuming editing and revising. This fiddling potentially proliferates differently versions of the essentially the same information which creates redundant copies, more often than not remaining in circulation. The overuse of emails instead of direct communication (i.e. talking to people) or making better use of intranets merely fills up inboxes and distracts workers

Spawning spreadsheet and documents as so often happens in organisations is a version control nightmare. The moment these are printed out or attached to an email they start becoming out of date. Despite all these issues information has economic value and our networked world brings many advantages . Clearly the technology is not to blame, but is in its misuse or even under-use. There is a role both in design and education. End user education is largely dealt with elsewhere. Here we suggest the technological solutions.

Web 2.0 - the problem or the solution?

Ironical social media is an excellent spam filter; you choose whom you can hear from. Also it provides mechanisms for providing regular news and updates that interested parties can choose to look at or not. Intranets and corporate websites can use the same principle. The alternative of sending out email newsletters will at best distract as well adding to the inbox.

A single moment of truth

The use of networked servers rationalises resources, the client- server architecture provides a single moment of truth for that information. Where information and content controlled by database technology can be manipulated and shared in consistent way. Conceptually everyone sees the same content in the same location without any confusing duplication or variation.

Bicycles for the mind

Separate Presentation from Content

Also presentation can be separated from content. By using style sheets for example, the look and feel can be changed in one place and carried over to the whole system. Otherwise all documents would require editing individually or end up with inconsistent styles. This speeds up the changing of existing content and also simplifies the addition of new. This separation of concerns is one of the motivations behind the use of XML (extensible mark up language) .

Bicycles for the mind

Much of this is old hat. Whilst new challenges may have emerged, the technology has always been there to help humans cope with intrinsically difficult cognitive loads. The late Steve Jobs described computers as bicycles for the mind. Why not use them for the purpose for which they were intended?


Further Reading

Collins, N. (2010, December 07). Has Email has turned us into 'lab rats'. Retrieved November 2011, from The Daily Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8184149/Email-has-turned-us-into-lab-rats.html

Fleming, N. (1996). Coping with a Revolution: Will the Internet Change Learning. Retrieved Novemeber 11, 2011, from http://www.vark-learn.com/documents/Information_and_Knowle.pdf

Nielsen, J. (2003, August 11). Information Pollution. Retrieved November 8, 2011, from Alert Box: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030811.html

Steve Jobs on You Tube, talking about "Bicycles for the mind" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c

for more information on Web 2.0

For discussions on the value of information and the advantages in being networked as well as technological implications and challenges, see: http://www.softengines.co.uk/page.php?id=teleinformatics

17 November 2011
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