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Information Overload
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A number of very interesting books have been released over the past year or two which debate how the Internet is reshaping our culture and the economy. I’ve reviewed a couple of them here but I have been waiting to compile a sort of mega-book review once I found a sensible way to conceptually group them together. I’m not going to have time to cover each of them here in the detail they deserve, but I think I have at least found a sensible way to categorize them. For lack of better descriptors, I’ve divided these books and thinkers into two camps: "Internet optimists" versus "Internet Pessimists."
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As the 2008 U.S. presidential election approaches, tens of millions of voters have to make up their minds. They face the task of sifting through media reports, televised debates, political advertisements, campaign literature and conversations with family and friends to identify a candidate who best reflects their political views.
That just may be too much to ask, though.
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The onslaught of cellphone calls and e-mail and instant messages is fracturing attention spans and hurting productivity. It is a common complaint. But now the very companies that helped create the flood are trying to mop it up.
Some of the biggest technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M., are banding together to fight information overload. Last week they formed a nonprofit group to study the problem, publicize it and devise ways to help workers — theirs and others — cope with the digital deluge.
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IP network giant Cisco estimates that the use of video over global consumer IP networks will grow from 22 percent in 2007 to nearly 90 percent of all consumer IP traffic by 2012.
The company’s Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast for 2007-2012 predicts that IP traffic will increase at a combined annual growth rate (CAGR) of 46 percent between 2007 and 2012, resulting in an annual bandwidth demand on the world’s IP networks of approximately 522 exabytes(2) or more than half a zettabyte.
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Most information overload will come from your work environment. Sadly, the information that overloads you at work is also that which is of greatest consequence if ignored. But not all of it is someone else’s fault.
Time perfectionists.
Quality perfectionists.
Finish lines over deadlines.
Think like a genius.
Meetings and time.
Avoid overloading others.
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The introspection in Silicon Valley comes with defensiveness, judging from conversations with those involved. Digital communications are sacrosanct, the tools of the revolution, so the criticisms of them are merely a path to thinking about how they can be done better. And, of course, the solution to the technology problem is simply more and better technology.
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Distracted? And how. Beeped and pinged, interrupted and inundated, overloaded and hurried — that’s how we live today. We prize knowledge work — work that relies on our intellectual abilities — and yet increasingly feel that we have no time to think. For all our connectivity, we often catch little more than snippets and glimpses of one another.
The greatest casualty of our mobile, high-tech age is attention.
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We work together to build awareness of the world's greatest challenge to productivity, conduct research, help define best practices, contribute to the creation of solutions, share information and resources, offer guidance and facilitation, and help make the business case for fighting information overload.
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Email and other communications technologies are supposed to make us more productive. But has the pendulum swung so far that these tools are now a productivity drain?
Many large tech companies are worried that it has. That’s why IBM, Intel, Google, Microsoft and more than a dozen other companies and academic institutions have come together to form the Information Overload Research Group
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Microsoft Research has released a tool in the astronomy field, that does what Google Earth does for geography. Microsoft's World Wide Telescope is a new web-based application that can present information from dozens of different sources to allow you to view the night sky.
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