About

FAQ

Samples

Feedback

Contact

Information Overload By BEN GLASSON
	WellBeing 2001 Annual Edition

It was among British and American intelligence decoders during World War Two that the symptoms of information overload were first detected. They would spend hours upon hours amidst vast piles of enemy communication data looking for meaningful patterns. With today’s mass communication technologies, it’s not hard to feel like a code breaker yourself, having to decipher what information is relevant to you from the vast array available.

Information fatigue syndrome (IFS) is the medical term that has been coined for information overload. The symptoms are wide-ranging, including eyestrain, RSI, indigestion, insomnia and stress. The number of reported cases is rising sharply.

IFS is a serious problem rooted in a simple dilemma: Technologies that process, store and deliver information are advancing rapidly while the human brain and nervous system remain relatively unchanged. IFS is simply a reflection of human physiology not being designed to cope with such vast quantities of data. Yet it’s somewhat ironic that, after hearing for years that information is a good thing and knowledge is power, researchers are now finding that quite the opposite can be the case.

There is no ‘cure’ for IFS, but researchers are developing a better understanding of the condition and are discovering practical methods that can help you manage your information load.

Background

It’s not hard to see how the term ‘data smog’ has come about when you consider how much information you are exposed to in a single day. You read the newspaper over breakfast. You listen to the radio on the way to work. You arrive at work and read your email and listen to your voicemail. Throughout the day, you make and receive dozens of phone calls and read maybe hundreds of memos, reports, letters and faxes. You catch up on the latest industry journals.

Yet, despite this mass of information, you find it is not enough and you must go surfing the Web for more.

Then you arrive home from work and there is more mail and advertising material waiting to be read. You catch the evening television news after dinner then maybe a current affairs program too. Later in the evening, you read a magazine. Finally, you retire to bed, but feel you need to just ‘run your eyes over’ last month’s sales figures in preparation for tomorrow morning’s meeting.

Then there’s the verbal communication at work and at home. Helping with your child’s homework and planning the itinerary of your summer vacation fill your brain with even more data.

The amount of information available today would have been incomprehensible even a generation ago. Consider the Internet, for instance. A relatively new information technology, yet it already contains nearly a billion pages of information, a figure that is quadrupling every year.

Consider a much older communication technology: the book. There has been no sign of the predicted obsolescence of printed communications. In fact, it was announced recently that more books are being published – nearly one million new titles per year worldwide – than ever before. As new technologies for information transmittal mushroom, the older technologies are not declining. If anything, they are expanding too.

The immense amount of information being fed to you is problem enough, but it is not only the quantity that is contributing to the rise of information fatigue syndrome. Half of the problem lies in the quality of information, the way in which it is delivered.

Graphicity and shock value are increasingly being relied upon to capture attention. “If it bleeds, it leads” is a catchcry of TV news producers. Murder, scandal and crises of all dimensions head our nightly television bulletins. Information is ‘hammed up’ and charged with exaggerated emotion to try to stand out from the overcrowded information marketplace and win a few seconds worth of attention from channel-surfing viewers.

Media analysts have even coined a term for the hyping-up of much of our news: “Media Darwinism” – the survival of only the starkest, most dramatic, most disturbing, most extreme and most stimulating news stories. Information of such high emotional content not only contributes to the overall ‘data smog’ but is harmful in itself. Some mental health experts, like Andrew Weil, author of Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, are advocating that you avoid watching or reading any news at all. They argue that any news that is important or relevant enough for you to need to know, will reach you via other channels.

The availability of vast quantities of information is not a bad thing in itself. Indeed, information fatigue syndrome may not exist if you were exposed only to information you want or need. The problem is the irrelevant clutter you must sift through to get to what you need.

Symptoms of IFS

Less than a quarter of a century ago, a study concluded that information overload was a ‘phantom’ condition. It was an invention, a fiction that ‘did not exist for most people in most circumstances’ (Wilson 1976). Now though, studies are confirming what health and human resources experts have long suspected: too much information can be bad for you.

The human brain has its limits. Feed it more information than it can handle and serious medical conditions are likely to develop. Cardiovascular stress, eye damage and increased blood cholesterol are among the symptoms of IFS.

As well as medical problems, IFS makes relationships harder to maintain. Psychologist Dr David Lewis, author of the book “Information Overload”, believes IFS makes people harder to get along with. “The sheer volume of information we have to deal with daily,” he writes, “means that work stress spills out into home life, our sex drive is impaired, and our heads become so full of data that we find it hard to sleep.”

IFS results in a lack of mental wellbeing, says occupational psychologist Professor Cary Cooper of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in England. “It takes us away from other people,” he says. “We’re not sustaining our relationships, and, sedentary, we get no exercise.”

IFS sufferers report feeling irritable, frustrated, vulnerable and impatient. Addictive behaviours such as alcoholism are commonplace among sufferers.

Predictably, IFS is having its biggest impact in the workplace. Workplace-related IFS sufferers report feeling chronically overloaded, stressed, and burnt out. Among other problems, IFS can lead to ‘paralysis by analysis’, making if far harder to find the right solutions or make the best decisions. With too much to be done, you may find yourself doing nothing at all, something psychologists call ‘busy lethargy’.

In 1996 the report “Dying for Information? An investigation into the effects of information overload in the U.K. and World-wide”, based on a survey of 1300 managers in industrialized countries, was published by Reuters. According to the report, “the worldwide burden of keeping up with the information explosion has led to soaring executive stress, loss of job satisfaction and physical ill-health.” Sixty-two percent of managers, the survey found, testify their personal relationships have suffered as a direct result of information overload. Forty-three percent of senior managers suffer from ill health as a direct consequence of stress associated with information overload.

Risk factors

Are you in control of information technology, using it to help you work and live more effectively, or is it controlling you, harming your mental and physical wellbeing? To try to find out, ask yourself the following questions. Do you:

• Find it hard to ‘just sit’; always feeling you should be reading something?

• Regularly take work-related reading material to bed?
• Ever experience feelings of helplessness, anxiety and stress, particularly at work?
• Ever get frustrated because you can’t find information you dealt with only recently (you can’t remember if it was in a newspaper, at a website, in one of your files or somewhere on the hard disk of your computer)?

· Find it hard to recall in detail information you absorbed at work today?

· Ever feel overwhelmed, frustrated and irritable?

· Ever have trouble making decisions, even when the outcome is not that important?

If you answered ‘yes’ more often than ‘no’, then you could be under pressure to absorb more information than you are capable.

IFS is such an insidious condition that you won’t automatically know you are suffering from it. Being so accustomed to large quantities of information, it won’t immediately strike you that something is wrong. You may just have a vague feeling of something being out of balance. You will need to learn to manage your information load more effectively.

Managing your information load to prevent IFS

Withdrawing completely from information is not the way around information fatigue syndrome. Information is essential. It helps you make smarter judgements and operate more efficiently and effectively. It is your exposure to the extraneous information, the irrelevant information you are bound to come across in a world of abundant information, that you should try to minimize.

There is no simple way to do this, but by adopting some of these techniques, you can at least manage the symptoms and try to stay on top of the information glut.

At home

• Ration your television viewing hours. Even the news is a big time-killer and a brain drain. Why not adopt the approach many families have taken and keep your TV in a cabinet, bringing it out only for special viewing
• Try to stay calm when technology makes you wait. Instead of feeling frustrated when you are told your ‘call has been placed in a queue’, use that time to rest or attend to small tasks
• Attach a “no advertising material” sign to your mailbox. You probably enjoy browsing catalogues, but how much useful information do they contain?
• Keep your telephone number silent to reduce calls from telemarketers and market researchers
• Enjoy regular ‘time-out’ sessions. Go into the country without TV, radio or newspapers to bother you. This is important as it lets your subconscious process and assimilate the information you have absorbed
• Find a few hours each week to switch off your mobile phone or pager. Be uncontactable and give your mind a chance to settle

At work

• Choose your technologies carefully. You don’t have to have every info-gadget – if pagers and mobile phones cause you stress, stick to voicemail
• Handle each piece of paper only once. Either use it and file it away, or throw it in the recycling bin
• Cut out the useful articles from the journals and magazines you receive. You’ll save valuable time usually spent reading irrelevant articles that catch your eye
• Respond in your own time. Turn off the e-mail ding and mute the ringer on the fax machine. Don’t immediately attend to non-urgent requests
• When you receive ‘spam’ email, or any unsolicited information, reply with a short message requesting you be removed from the sender’s mailing list otherwise you will contact their service provider
• Take ten minutes to read the ‘search tips’ pages at your favourite internet search engine site. Effective searching will minimize the quantity of irrelevant material you have to scan
• Keep meetings short. Confirm at the start of the meeting what the agenda and timeframe are. If the discussion gets off track, guide it back to the issue at hand. Schedule another meeting to deal with the other issues if necessary
• When you are faced with an important decision, become a ‘satisficer’, not a ‘maximiser’. Learn to make a decision when you have gathered a satisfactory amount of information upon which to act. Don’t postpone making the decision until you feel you have all the relevant information available, as you could be waiting forever

Learning to manage your information intake to avoid the problems associated with IFS is becoming a vital skill for healthful living in the information age. As new technologies exacerbate the impact of IFS, practical measures such as the above will help you prepare for the ever-thickening data smog of the future.

phone +61 362 311 611 e-mail ben@benglasson.com