Information Obesity

Roland Piquepaille writes "How many phone calls, emails, voicemails, memos or stories do you have to go through every day? Probably more than last year. And probably too much. This article from the Sydney Morning Herald looks at this problem of information overload and how to deal with it. Here is a quick and not well-known fact: Website content management author Gerry McGovern says that something like 70 per cent of most websites goes unread. Despite that, when putting content on the web, "rarely do we ask the question: is anybody interested in reading that?" Good point. Check this column for a summary if you don't have time -- and who has? -- to read the original article."

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Full text of article (kinda), in case of /.ing

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Well, I would post the full article here in case of slashdotting but, as you're going to ignore 70 percent of it, here's the first 30 percent:

Spinning around

By David Adams
May 20 2003
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Another day in the office, which, according to one recent study, consists of handling 46 phone calls, 25 emails, 16 voicemails, 23 items of post, eight inter-office memos, 16 faxes and nine mobile phone calls. While that sounds scary, its even more alarming to think that those figures - taken from a 2000 survey of companies employing between 100 and 499 staff conducted by Pitney Bowes in partnership with the US-based forecaster the Institute for the Future - are likely to have risen.

Enough to send you barmy? You may be right. Experts say information overload is a serious problem in many companies, adding to stress levels and resulting in a downturn in productivity (a report from Proudfoot Consulting last year found IT-related problems - such as information overload - were responsible for 8 per cent of lost time).

Irish website content management author and public speaker Gerry McGovern believes the problem known as information overload stems from the fact that since the founding of civilisation man has been operating on the premise that more is better. "(It's) the-more-the-merrier kind of concept ... if we create more, we create more value," McGovern says.

"But we have begun to shift into a digital-type of economy and society and I think the rules that operate within a digital economy are different from those which operate within the physical economy. Part of that is there is essentially no scarcity or there is very little scarcity in a digital economy. The constant movement is towards cheaper, faster processes, infinitely cheaper storage devices that can store vastly (greater) quantities of content or data."

McGovern says this impulse to do more and create more has resulted in a "glut situation".

"Information overload is a reflection of that almost genetic historic desire to do more," he says.

Brooklyn-based author David Shenk, who has written several books and articles on the issue including Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut (1997), uses the term "information obesity", saying that where once we lived in a world where food was scarce and people struggled to get enough calories to keep them alive, today the industrialised world has the opposite problem.

"Information is the same way," he says. "We need information and contact and stimulus but we're now in a situation where the challenge is not so much to get hold of it as it is to be discriminate about what we expose ourselves to. Most everyone in the industrialised world can get their hands on a silo full of data and stimulus in a matter of minutes. The challenge is to get the most relevant, meaningful, contextualised information so that we can turn that into useful knowledge and wisdom."