Tom Davenport writes a pretty long post on his Harvard Business blog to explain Why We Don’t Care About Information Overload, which I quite don’t agree. Please have a look to it, as well as its conversation through comments.
The text below was initially intended to be a comment on Tom Davenport’s blog. However, I could not publish it, due to a persistent and well identified issue. So I gave up, headed to my blog and used the trackback instead.
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I appreciate the argumentation but I think it is biased, as you focus too much on the consumer side and the quantitative side of information.
I think those two points are behind what Craig Roth above define as “nihilistic”.
Yes information overload is there for some time and will remain. This is the downside of the information-based “industrial revolution” and it underlines the entropic nature of it.
Now, having being fed and influenced by your writings on Knowledge Management during my PhD years, I have to confess that I would have expected more balance on:
- How organisations / society deal with it, and not just individuals. Maybe some individuals handle easily the attention/psychological cost of overload (infobesity). However, information overload has massive impacts on the required capabilities and therefore impact both budgets and bottom lines. And not necessarily in directing investments towards the most adequate technologies to invent the future and build new wealth.
- How individuals and organisations - thru knowledge management and computing science - build processes and devices that help filter the overload (quantity) to extract relevance (quality). This is one of the principal driver for adoption of social computing (tools and behaviours) in organisations, as people and mashup are filters for themselves … and others (see a presentation here: http://bit.ly/1unTeB).
Therefore “the next time you hear someone talking or read someone writing about information overload”, make the point and educate people instead of saving “your own attention and tun[ing] that person out” and thinking that “Nobody’s ever going to do anything about this so-called problem”. Because that behaviour you encourage Sir is nihilism, strongly tainted with egoism. That is precisely what we don’t need!