The accelerating pace of life obliges us to know everything, understand everything and think about everything at once. But the truth is harsh: it is impossible to remain effective in a regime of information overload. How to be?

What causes information overload

The volume of information in the world is growing uncontrollably, and the possibilities of its duplication and transmission are increasing. At the same time, access to any information is becoming increasingly easier thanks to technological progress. Yes, to the owner modern gadgets you don't have to get up from your seat to find out last news, choose the product you need, see works of art, send a letter anywhere in the world.

This is all well and good, but every coin has two sides.

An excess of information entering the consciousness can put pressure on a person no less than cosmic overloads. Internet users are enmeshed in communication channels that require immediate response: reply to an email, comment on a post, like or vote. The brain is forced to process every second great amount necessary and unnecessary information. This explains why healthy people suddenly they begin to complain of headaches, fatigue, sleep disturbances, anxiety and absent-mindedness.

How information overload manifests itself

Often an overabundance of information makes a person feel that he does not keep up with the movement of life, constantly loses sight of something, and copes poorly with his activities. Hence the depression, the feeling of being lost, losing control over the situation.

An excess of information that a person simply cannot absorb can worsen the quality of work and personal life.

• Decline in productivity. It would seem that an employee has several tabs open on his computer, two mail windows and a work communicator, he is trying to read articles, work in information system, alternately responds to letters and phone calls. The whole day is spent doing this activity, but multitasking turns out to be unproductive - real result he didn't achieve it.
• Decreased concentration. The need to be distracted by messages and calls takes you out of a state of deep immersion in work. It takes more and more time to complete a task. And irritants in the form news feed, social networks, messengers constantly strive to divert attention to the side.
• Decreased creativity. By wasting time and energy on unproductive activities (watching news, email, etc.), a person cannot fully apply a creative approach to tasks.
• Inability to make a decision. Science knows the paradox when more choice given to a person can lead to worst solution, even to the point of refusing to make a decision. Sometimes inaction can be explained by an overabundance of information that has fallen on a person.
• Stressful conditions. It is no coincidence that the lists of the most stressful professions are consistently topped by those associated with processing large amounts of information.

How to prevent overload

Prioritization and systematization

Hope for global reduction and streamlining information flow not worth it. We need to build a dam ourselves to protect against negative consequences overloads

It is important to set priorities - write down immediate goals and focus on the information that is needed to achieve them. Use one browser tab, working only on the most important and urgent task. Unsubscribe from mailings and channels that are not needed to achieve your goal. In a series of endlessly incoming information, study only the information that can be applied to your life. Skip the rest.

Self-control

You need to fight the habit of checking your email every minute by setting a schedule for viewing it. It is useful to configure the sorting of letters in the mailbox and use the prioritization function.

Productive solitude

A tired person needs to find time when he can be alone with himself, without gadgets. How to fill this gap? Sports, creativity, relaxation techniques, a walk.

It is important to completely disconnect from the information barrage, giving your nervous system rest.

Work breaks

Employees who take short breaks are generally more effective than those who do not rest during the workday. Of course, a 15-minute rest should be free from information noise: a leisurely cup of tea or a short walk is preferable to scrolling through web pages.

Limiting incoming information and getting rid of “information garbage” will qualitatively change your life.

While overstimulation at the sensory level increases the distortion with which we perceive reality, cognitive overstimulation (at the conscious level) interferes with our ability to “think.” Some people react to news spontaneously, while others are aware and reflect on it first, and this depends on the ability to absorb, process, evaluate and store information 10 .

Rational behavior typically depends on a continuous flow of input from the environment. It depends on the individual's ability to predict more or less accurately and honestly the consequences of his own actions. The individual must be able to anticipate how he will react environment to his actions. Therefore, the sound mind as such is built on this human ability to foresee its immediate personal

future based on information from the environment.

However, when an individual is plunged into a rapidly and chaotically changing situation or into a news-stuffed environment, the accuracy of his foresight rapidly decreases. He can no longer make the rational corrective judgments upon which rational behavior depends.

In order to compensate for this, in order to raise the accuracy of his foresight to a normal level, a person must grasp and continue to receive much more information than before. He must do this at extremely high speed. In short, the faster change and novelty occur in the environment, the more information an individual needs in order to respond most effectively and make rational decisions.

However, there are limits to the perception of sensory information, there is a genetic limit to our ability to process information. In the words of psychologist George Miller of Rockefeller University, these are “strict limits on the amount of information we can take in, process, and remember.” By classifying, summarizing, and "coding" information in various ways, we are able to push these limits until we have good reason to believe that our capabilities have been exhausted."

To discover and measure these outer limits, psychologists and information theorists use techniques to test what they call the "channel capacity" of the human body. In order to carry out these experiments, they consider man as a “channel”*. Information enters it from the outside. It is perceived and processed, then “comes out” in the form of an action based on the decision made. The speed and accuracy of human information processing can be measured by comparing the speed of input information with the speed and accuracy of output information**.

* through which information passes. - Note lane

** or output actions. - Note lane

Information is defined and measured in special units called bits*. Now experiments are testing the speed of information processing, including a wide range of tasks: reading, typing, playing the piano, to create number scales or a computing device. And because researchers disagree about the accuracy of the data they produce, they strictly agree on two basic principles: first, that humans have limited “carrying capacity”; secondly, that overcrowding the system leads to serious behavioral disturbances.

Let's imagine, for example, an assembly line worker in a factory that produces children's blocks. His job is to press a button whenever a red cube passes in front of him on the conveyor belt. As long as the conveyor belt moves at a moderate speed, he does not experience any serious difficulties. His work is carried out with 100% accuracy. We know that if the speed is too slow, his consciousness will wander, his thoughts will wander and his performance will deteriorate. We also know that if the belt moves too fast, he will work erratically, miss button presses, get confused, and increase the inconsistency between his actions and the operation of the conveyor. He will become tense and irritable. He can even hit the car - out of complete powerlessness. Eventually he will refuse to participate in testing.

In this case, the information requirements are simple, but the picture also applies to a more complex test. Let now the cubes moving along the conveyor belt be multi-colored. A worker is supposed to press a button only when a certain combination of colors appears - say, a yellow cube is followed by two red and one green. In this task he must receive and process much

* A bit is the amount of information necessary to make a choice between two equivalent (i.e., equally probable. - Note trans.) alternative type solutions. The number of bits by which the selected solution must exceed is doubled.

more information before deciding whether to press the button. Everything else remains the same, and he will have the same difficulties, increasing as the assembly line speeds up.

In an even more complex task, we not only subject the worker to the amount of data he must process before deciding whether to press a button, but we force him to decide which of several buttons to press. We also change the number of clicks on each button. Now his task looks like this: for a set of colors yellow-red-red-green, press button number 2 once; to dial green-blue-yellow-green, press button number 6 three times; etc. Such tasks require the worker to process a large amount of information in order to complete the task given to him. Changing the conveyor speed in this case will immediately negate the accuracy of its operation 12 .

Similar experiments were conducted in order to evaluate the effect of an additional degree of task complexity on the performer's behavior. The tests became more complicated, they included light flashes, musical sounds, letters, symbols, conversations and a wide range of other stimuli. The subjects were asked to tap their fingers on a table, speak single phrases, solve puzzles, and perform a variety of other tasks - this left them completely unable to do anything.

The results clearly showed that, regardless of the nature of the task, there is a presentation speed, exceeding which, the task cannot be completed - and not simply because of the inadequacy of muscle effort, lack of agility, dexterity. The speed limit was often imposed by consciousness rather than by muscular limitations. These experiments also found that the more time the subject was given to choose a solution and complete the task, the more alternative courses of action were open to him.

It is clear that these discoveries can help us understand known forms of psychological and even mental races.

construction Managers are concerned with the demands of fast, continuous and comprehensive decision making; people are inundated with information, facts and are constantly being tested; housewives confront screaming children, harsh phone calls, broken washing machines, screams of doom from the teenagers' room and the plaintive whine of the television from the small living room. People's ability to think and act is significantly weakened by the influence, the influx of information that overwhelms their senses. And it is more than likely that some of the symptoms noted in soldiers under stress during battle, in victims of natural disasters, and in travelers experiencing culture shock are akin to this type of information overload.

One of the pioneers of the study of computer science, Dr. James G. Miller, director of the Institute for Mental Health Research at the University of Michigan, emphatically stated that "saturating a person with more information than he can process... leads to breakdown." He stated that he was confident that information overload could be a cause various forms mental illness 13.

For example, one of the striking features of schizophrenia is “imprecise associative response.” Ideas and words that should be connected by analogy in the subject's brain are not connected, and on the contrary, those that normal people do not associate with each other at all are connected. The schizophrenic tends to think in random or overly subjective categories. If you give a set of different shapes - triangles, cubes, cones, etc. - a normal person will sort them out based on their geometric properties. A schizophrenic who is asked to classify them is likely to say: “They are all soldiers” or “They all make me sad.”

In Information Turmoil, Miller describes experiments that used word association tests to compare normal people with schizophrenics. Normal subjects were divided into

two groups, they were asked to find associations of various words with other words or concepts. One group worked at its natural rhythm. The second one worked under the pressure of a time limit, i.e. in conditions of accelerating information flow. Subjects under time pressure produced responses that were more similar to those of schizophrenics than to those of normal subjects working at their own pace 14 .

Similar experiments conducted by psychologists G. Uzdanski and L. Chapman made it possible to more subtle analysis types of errors that subjects made when working under time pressure and high speed presentation of information. They also concluded that increasing reaction speed among normal people produces errors of the same nature as the errors characteristic of schizophrenics.

“One thing that can be assumed,” Miller concludes, “... is that schizophrenia (as a still unknown process, possibly associated with a metabolic defect that increases neural “noise”) reduces the capacity of the channels, which includes the processing of cognitive information. Schizophrenics thus... have difficulty receiving information entering at normal speeds, just as normal people have difficulty receiving information at increased speeds. As a result, schizophrenics, at normal rates of information flow, make the same mistakes that they make normal people at an accelerated rate of information flow."

In short, Miller argues that the mechanism of human behavior breaks down under the influence of information overload, which may be associated with psychopathology, which we have not yet begun to study. But even now, without understanding its potential impact, we are increasing the rate of change in society. We put pressure on people, forcing them to adapt to new rhythms of life, to face new

situations and cope with them in an increasingly shorter time. We force them to choose fast-changing items. In other words, we encourage them to process information with much more higher speed and at a faster pace than in slowly changing societies. Therefore, there is no doubt that we are subjecting at least some of them to overstimulation of consciousness. What consequences this will have for the mental health of people in technologically advanced societies remains to be determined.

Information overload

There is too much information on the notice board

Concept "Information overload" popularized by Alvin Toffler in his 1970 best-selling book Future Shock. The term refers to the difficulty of understanding a problem and making decisions that is caused by too much information. The term itself is mentioned in Bertram Gross's 1964 book, Organization Management.

The term and concept predate the Internet, and can be assessed from a library and information sciences, as well as from a psychological point of view. In psychology, information overload refers to an overabundance of information entering our consciousness. According to Toffler, information overload is sensory overload in Information Age, a term that was coined in 1950. Sensory overload was understood as the cause of disorientation and lack of response. Toffler argued that information overload has this kind of effect only at a higher cognitive level, he writes: “When a person is immersed in a rapidly and irregularly changing situation or a new rich context, his predictive accuracy declines. He can no longer make the reliable assessment on which rational behavior depends.”

As the world enters a new era of globalization, more and more people are connecting to the Internet to conduct their own research and be able to produce and consume data from more and more sites. Users are now classified as active users because more and more people are becoming embraced by the digital age. An increasing number of people are considered active writers and viewers because of their participation. This thread creates new life where we are in danger of becoming dependent on this method of accessing information. Therefore, we see that information overload due to instant access to so much information does not guarantee reliability and the absence of misinformation.

According to Seattle Sonora Jha University, journalists use the web to conduct their research, obtain information regarding sources for interviews and press releases, update news online and thus it shows a gradual shift in attitudes due to the rapid growth of the Internet. Lawrence Lessig described the nature of the Internet as "read-write".

Story

Early history

Information overload has been documented in all periods when advances in technology have increased the production of information. As early as the 3rd and 4th centuries BC, people frowned upon information overload. Around the same time, Ecclesiastes wrote: “And moreover, my son, beware of compiling many books - there will be no end; and reading a lot is tiresome for the flesh.” In the 1st century AD, Seneca the Elder commented that "an abundance of books is a distraction." Similar complaints surrounding the rise of books have also been mentioned in China.

Renaissance

Common reasons

The main causes of information overload include:

• the rapid growth of new information that is being produced
• ease of duplication and data transfer via the Internet
• increase available channels incoming information (for example, telephone, Email, instant exchange messages, rss)
• a large amount of historical information
• contradictions and inaccuracies in available information
• low signal-to-noise ratio
• lack of comparison and processing method various types information
• pieces of information are not connected or have no general structure to identify their relationship

Email remains a major source of information overload as people struggle to keep up with the speed of incoming messages. Same as with filtering unwanted advertising messages(spam) users have to contend with the growing use of email attachments in the form of lengthy reports, presentations and multimedia files.

In 2007, the New York Times blog described email as the reason the economy is losing $650 billion. In April 2008, the New York Times reported that "email has become the bane of some people's professional lives" due to information overload, but "none of today's high-profile Internet startups focused on email are really addressing the problem of overload." because no one is helping us prepare answers."

In January 2011, Eve Tahmincioglu, who works for MSNBC, wrote an article entitled "What to do about a crowded by mailbox" Compiling statistics with expert commentary, she reported that in 2010, 294 billion messages were sent daily, in 2009 - 50 billion. Quoting the author: Masha Egan, an expert on work productivity, said that people need to understand the difference between working with emails and sorting them. This meant deleting unnecessary emails and sorting through the rest before immediately responding to every email. Then Egan says: We are more conductive than ever before, and as a result, we must be more careful when managing email, otherwise it will manage us.

The Daily Telegraph quotes Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review and author of Dummy: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, as saying that email exploits our basic human instinct to seek out new information, making people addicted, forcing them to " mindlessly pushing levers in the hope of getting a dose of social and intellectual nourishment.” His concerns were echoed by Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, who said that "instant devices" and the abundance of information to which people are exposed through email and other technological sources can have an impact on the thought process, inhibiting deep thinking, understanding, inhibiting the formation of memories and complicates the learning process. This state of “cognitive overload” reduces the ability to retain information and does not allow connecting memories and experiences stored in long-term memory, leaving thoughts “subtle and scattered.” This is reflected in the educational process.

Technology investors are showing similar concerns.

In addition to email, the World Wide Web has provided access to billions of pages of information. Many offices provide workers with unlimited internet access, allowing them to manage their own research. Usage search engines allows users to quickly find information. However, information published online is not always reliable due to lack of approval authority and mandatory accuracy checks before publication. As a result, people cross-check what they read before making a decision, and this takes longer.

Reactions

Reaction of business and government

Many scientists corporate entities decision makers and federal policymakers recognize the magnitude and growing impact of this phenomenon. In June 2008, a group of interested researchers from a variety of corporations, small companies, academic institutions and consulting agencies formed the Information Overload Research Group, a non-profit interest group dedicated to raising awareness, sharing results scientific research and facilitating the creation of solutions around information overload.

Recent research suggests that the "attention economy" stems from information overload, allowing Internet users to gain greater control over their online experience, especially with regard to communication tools such as email and services. instant messages. This may imply some cost to those tied to emails. For example, managers charge small fee for each letter received, for example, $5, which the sender must pay. The purpose of this charge is to force the sender to consider taking a break. However, such a proposal undermines the basis of the popularity of e-mail, namely, its free nature.

mass media

The media, like the Internet, conducts research to help raise awareness of information overload. The study, “Cancer Predictors of Information Overload: Findings from a National Survey,” examined how people who experienced information overload while searching for health information about cancer and how it affected them. The study's conclusion explains how health information should be distributed and how information campaigns should be conducted to prevent the spread of inappropriate or incorrect information online.

Additionally, there are many books being published to promote a greater understanding of information overload and to train the reader to process information more consciously and effectively. Books such as Kevin Miller's Surviving Information Overload, Lynn Lively's Managing Information Overload, and Stefania Luchetti's The Relevance Principle have productively addressed this topic.

Organization problem

Some cognitive scientists and graphic designers emphasize the difference between raw information and information in the form in which we can use it in mental operations. From this point of view, information overload will be more clearly shown as an organization of underload. That is, they suggest that the problem is not so much the amount of information, but that we cannot figure out how to use it in the raw or biased form in which it is presented to us. The authors who took this course are graphic artist and architect Richard Soule Wurman (the man who coined the phrase " information architect") and statistician and cognitive scientist Edward Taft. Wurman uses the term “information anxiety” to describe our relationship with the amount of information in general and our limitations on processing it. Tuft primarily focuses on quantitative information and analyzes ways to organize large, complex data sets visually to facilitate clear thinking.

Literature

• * Elyakov A.D. Information overload of people // Sociological studies. 2005. No. 5. P. 114-121. .

Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

See what “Information overload” is in other dictionaries:

information overload- - [L.G. Sumenko. English-Russian dictionary on information technology. M.: State Enterprise TsNIIS, 2003.] Topics information Technology in general EN information overloadinformation overloading... Technical Translator's Guide

Information war- - this term first came into the focus of public attention in connection with the Gulf War in 1991. In general, the crown of classical military history is the two world wars of the 20th century. Technological progress has reached unprecedented heights, up to... ... Encyclopedic Dictionary of Media

R. is related to the study of productive human activity, as well as physical activity. and mental reactions of people to energy expenditure in industrial and non-industrial settings. It has been found that fatigue, both mental and physical,... ... Psychological Encyclopedia

This article or section needs revision. Please improve the article in accordance with the rules for writing articles. Internet s... Wikipedia

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Information overload. Information explosion. Ineffective thinking. Ambulance.

“Less is more” is the best saying that can be said about information now. There is so much of it that your head is spinning. The volume of information doubles every 18 months. In 2002, humanity produced 18∙10 18 bytes (18 Exabytes) of information, or just over 18 billion gigabytes.

In this short post I want to draw attention to information overload syndromes and precautions when handling information. There is another catchphrase by N.M. Rodshtld: “Who owns the information, owns the World.” He, of course, meant the outside world. We will consider the inner world. Undoubtedly, you will agree that you need to have your own king in your head, unless, of course, you want to be owned by all sorts of Rodshelds.

What is information overload

The definition of Information Overload was first coined by City University London information science professor David Bawden in a 2008 study entitled The dark side of information: overload, anxiety and other paradoxes and pathologies. anxiety and other paradoxes and pathologies). It was co-authored by Bowden’s university colleague, Doctor of Computer Science Lyn Robinson, who studies the impact of received information on human behavior.

Bowden and Robinson defined information overload as “a state of civilization in which the volume of potentially useful and relevant information exceeds the average person's ability to process it and becomes a hindrance rather than an aid.” A simple example. A person needs to build a house, but he does not build it because he is hopelessly stuck at the stage of learning information about how to build a house.

Types of information overload

1. Information vampirism - dependence on information received via the Internet or television. The person does not look up from the TV or does not get out of global network, which essentially takes the form of escape from personal problems and compensation for life's unsettled conditions. This is similar to any chemical addiction - alcoholism, drug addiction and other addictions.

2. Multitasking - the need to do several things at the same time. But, as has been experimentally proven more than once, at one point in time a person can only do one thing, keeping short term memory from 5 to 7 elements. In such an atmosphere, a person spends much more energy switching attention between objects of concentration than on the work itself, because each time you switch, you have to refresh your memory. It feels like work random access memory computer or phone, when switching between applications, they frequent updates. About this type of information overload, we can say that a person only “pretends to work”, since his productivity is low.

3. Obtaining facts is a situation in which, on the way to useful and valuable information, you need to “shove through” a huge amount of information, and facts accumulate, but are not assimilated. This “kurkul” approach is also dangerous, since it inevitably turns all potential useful information into useless trash (not used).

Information explosion.

Information in modern world is accumulating at an alarming rate - according to Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, “From the beginning of civilization until 2003, about 5 Exabytes (5,000,000,000 GB) of information were created. Now humanity creates so much data in just 2 days.”

The digital Universe is growing faster than expected in the wildest forecasts: experts from the analytical firm International Data Corporation (IDC) assumed that by the beginning of 2011 humanity would have accumulated up to 1.8 ZB of information, but a large-scale study by ICANN revealed the presence of 2.56 Zettabytes of digital data in the world already in September of the same year. Note that a much earlier study by Bohn and Short, who indicated an information consumption volume of 3.6 Zettabytes for the United States alone, took into account repeated user access to the same traffic source (for example, multiplayer game servers).

The volume of information in the world increases annually by 30%. On average, 2.5∙10 8 bytes are produced per person per year in the world.

Meditation is perhaps the most effective method of emo-information cleansing and ambulance when experiencing acute informational and emotional overload. Go, download, do it. There will be a lot more useful if you subscribe to the newsletter. No spam.

By the way, it will be useful to know that our body has a self-defense system against extreme emotional irritation. It's called "stupor". If we compare the psyche with a car, then the stupor will correspond to braking “with the wheels completely locked.” A less pronounced form of stupor - “mild slowing down” - is a depression that many people love. Depression is a less pronounced reaction to information overload.

Here are some tips that can help you maintain your current order in your head.

• Collect only useful information. Don't try to find out everything about everything: at the current rate of information production, this is impossible.
• Be honest with yourself. If something is bothering you, don’t drown your anxiety in a sea of ​​unnecessary information.
• Don't take on several things at once, work on your tasks one at a time.
• Plan your time, highlight important and minor, urgent and not urgent tasks.
• Maintain a balance between work and rest, get enough sleep and rest (this is the most difficult thing).
• Take advantage of the wonderful property of the brain - to forget everything unnecessary and self-cleanse.

And finally, a few more interesting facts:

According to experts, about 1 petabyte text information throughout the Internet, as well as everything written by man, articles, books, textbooks, etc. At the same time, the amount of brain memory is different estimates is on the order of a zettabyte. However, a person cannot be considered as a storage device, such as a flash drive, because he can create information on his own, be its source. Flash drives and computers are not capable of this, so this comparison is unacceptable. And in general, all information exists because of human existence. He is the center, the source, the user.

• information overload causes serious stress and leads to overall poor health,
• and overuse social media may even lead to loss of short-term memory!

Avoid information overload whenever possible. Forewarned is forearmed.

In 1875, any competent mathematician could fully master the proofs of all theorems that existed at that time in a few months. In 1975, a year before the four-color theorem was proven, this was no longer out of the question, but individual mathematicians could still theoretically figure out the proof of any known theorem. By 2075, many areas of pure mathematics will be built on the use of theorems, the proofs of which cannot be fully understood by any mathematician living on Earth, either alone or through collective efforts.

And a similar situation will arise in almost all areas of modern science. Even I still remember the times when the term “geek” meant a completely self-sufficient generalist: a repairman, a low-level programmer, a specialist in local networks and so on - all this was combined within one personality. Next came parallelization and fragmentation.

In other words, further development of civilization will either slow down sharply, or “we will all change” and adapt to the current pace of development. Today's example of Ed showed that at least some people are able to overcome the psycho-information barrier under conditions of overload in order to acquire new species-specific “schizophrenic” properties. Whether this is good or bad, time will tell. I remember when I was still very young, it was said a lot that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin also knew how to read two books at once, but then he died painfully from “softening of the brain” (“but his work lives on,” the political instructor hastily stopped short at this point in political information classes). Having thought today about “software options” for changing humanity and overcoming the psycho-information barrier, next time we’ll talk about hardware attempts to “extend” the ordinary person - fortunately, chipization and computerization of the human body today is also developing by leaps and bounds.

As for our topic, reading the revelations of Ed, who boasts that for one Apache pilot who served for more than 3 years, there are more than 1000 killed Taliban, one involuntarily recalls the words of Charles Darwin, spoken by him back in the century before last:

Those forms that will suffer most, of course, are those that directly compete with those that have undergone modification and improvement.

P.S.: It's funny that the Sony Reader Store posted this book by Ed in the section Computers > Networking > Apache- I’m telling you, this whole story is written about the near future of computer scientists.