Information overload

A newer definition of information overload focuses on time and resource aspects: The advent of modern information technology has been a primary driver of information overload on multiple fronts: in quantity produced, ease of dissemination, and breadth of audience reached. Longstanding technological factors have been further intensified by the rise of social media and the attention economy. In the age of connective digital technologies, informatics, the Internet culture (or the digital culture), information overload is associated with the over-exposure, excessive consumption, and input abundance of information and data. The phenomenon of information overload was never novel. Ann Blair notes that while current information overload is linked to digital cultures and technologies, the term itself actually predates modern technologies. Indications of information overload were apparent when humans began collecting manuscripts, collecting, recording, and preserving information. One of the first social scientists to notice the negative effects of information overload was the sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918), who hypothesized that the overload of sensations in the modern urban world caused city dwellers to become jaded and interfered with their ability to react to new situations. The social psychologist Stanley Milgram (1933–1984) later used the concept of information overload to explain bystander behavior. Psychologists have recognized for many years that humans have a limited capacity to store current information in the memory. Psychologist George Armitage Miller was very influential in this regard, proposing that people can process about seven chunks of information at a time. Miller says that under overload conditions, people become confused and are likely to make poorer decisions based on the information they have received as opposed to making informed ones. A quite early example of the term 'information overload' can be found in an article by Jacob Jacoby, Donald Speller and Carol Kohn Berning, who conducted an experiment on 192 housewives which was said to confirm the hypothesis that more information about brands would lead to poorer decision making.