First thoughts on information overload

Information overload is one of the research themes we have chosen for 2005. Anjo already wrote something about it, because, poor him, he was asked to prepare some slides about the topic.

Two days ago we all presented our presonal views on information overload and discussed it. However different the views, there were more similarities than I expected beforehand. Here are some of my observations:

• Information overload has a very subjective element (not everybody suffers from it). We should talk with people, look at what they do, to get a better view on the matter
• Complexity and chaos was often mentioned. We live in a complex world, what can we do to reduce or handle it?
• Technology has a double role: it can reduce IO, but increase it at the same time (take e-mail, Google, Blogreader). Multi-channels, push-pull of information
• Cognitive (over)load is probably one of the reasons. Weight between effort and result
• Structuring, filtering can be helpful in solving

Some assumptions were nice:

• There is chaos now and there will always be chaos
• People are lazy (which links to the ideas of Janine about 'knowledge animal'

This is only the beginning, to start our project. There is far more to do and so we will in the coming year.

One thing I may start with is the following:

Anjo refers to an author I don't know (shame on me), Tufte, whose name suddenly appears in more weblogs (McGees Musings, Anecdote ).  What I understood is that Tufte is writing a book Beautiful Evidence, and there is one chapter Corrupt Techniques in Evidence Presentations that can be read. Maybe I should do that.

Comments

[Martin Roell]

That's an interesting subject you chose, Carla! Are you familiar with Ton Zijlstra's weblog posting on this? I found it really interesting. Jonathon Delacour has also done some thinking about information overload (blogged here).

I'll follow what you do closely, as it is very close to some work about knowledge worker productivity that I currently do.

[Carla]

Hi Martin,

Thanks for your suggestions. Ton contacted me (via Lilia) and we'll invite him as an 'expert' in one of our meetings. I'll keep you informed (via this weblog).

[Anjo]

Funnily enough the "Knowledge Flows" paper already identified Ton as an "expert" on the matter of information overload. Does Martin read our papers ... :-).

[Martin Roell]

I guess I suffered from information overload. ;-)