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Information Overload Predicted Problem of the Year for 2008
Wired is reporting that information overload is being predicted by some analysts as the problem of the year for 2008. "'It's too much information. It's too many interruptions. It's too much lost time,' Basex chief analyst Jonathan Spira declared. 'It's always too much of a good thing.' Information overload isn't exactly new, but Spira said the problem has grown as technology increases societal expectations for instantaneous response. And more information available, he said, also means more time wasted looking for the right information, whether in an old e-mail or through a search engine."
Information Overload Predicted Problem of the Year for 2008
Correction: Information Overlord Predicted Problem of the Year for 2008.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
But the answer was revealed recently over on
Why the Coming Data Flood Won't Drown the Internet:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=392492&cid=21737872
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
This problem isn't necessarily an overload of information. It's just a transformation. From the article:
These disoriented workers just found their new diversion. Workers are mostly effective, or not effective. Effective workers long ago folded the explosion of information into their daily work flow and are mostly more efficient because of it. Ineffective workers can now use and point to e-mail as their nemesis preventing them from being efficient and getting work done.
But, before the (alleged) explosion, ineffective workers had minesweeper and solitaire. Before that they had a water cooler and last night's shows to talk about. Before that it was real solitaire with real cards.
Yes, the information is overwhelming, but it's mostly easy to filter. I have found anecdotally that even with the exploding amount of information, that not only is it not overwhelming, it's more topical and current than ever possible in the past, and it's actually more easily searched than in the past. If any of you out there remember the old days of writing research papers, it was far more difficult to gather all the necessary research and organize when the only option was the local library, or if you were lucky and in college with a computing center, the other option was the time-share terminals in the computing building.
As for interruptions and avoiding them, it's easy enough to minimize e-mail interruptions -- establish and stick to an e-mail policy. If you don't want to be interrupted, don't allow people to interrupt you.
welcome our new information overlord. Wait, I read that wrong.
Now it's /.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
... the article gives an answer:
TFA: "also means more time wasted looking for the right information"
If looking for the 'right information' is considered 'waste of time', how do you think 'deciding which information is appropriate', i.e. actually thinking (no outside activity to be observed, mind that) is valued?
Much better to quickly produce a dupe of some blurb to add up to overload.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Wired Editor Attempts to Fill Whitespace
Fixed it for you.
Not a typewriter
Johnny Mnemonic: Yeah, the Black Shakes. What causes it?
Spider: What causes it?
[points to various pieces of equipment throughout the room]
Spider: This causes it! This causes it! This causes it! Information overload! All the electronics around you poisoning the airwaves. Technological fucking civilization. But we still have all this shit, because we can't live without it. Let me do my work.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Search finds the right stuff, if you remember the exact wording. Now look through 1 year old emails, looking for one where you only vaguely remember even the topic. Like, "I think the boss told me to do it that way."
Let's see, a search for the program name... nope. He must have thought it's obvious what project I'm on. Let's detour through Bugzilla and look up the bug number. Some time later, ah-ha, I have the bug number. Search for that, nope. Repeat ad nauseam.
The problem is that even remembering something by a synonym, still throws simple search off. Completely. Now let's see, in how many ways can you say "bug". Well, there's "bug", but then there's "flaw", or "defect", or even "problem", etc. So did the boss say it's ok to ship with known "bug", "flaws", "defects", "problems", or what? Now have fun finding out which of the tens of hits for "bug" is really the one you're looking for. But maybe even that wasn't phrased like that at all. Maybe what he said is something like, "it's ok if the web service interface isn't ready in the pilot phase." Or a gazillion other wordings to the same effect.
Or maybe it was my favourite, some idiot took a screenshot of the log viewer and pasted it into Word as an image. Then you get an email with the actual info as a picture, and some text like "but I think that's low priority right now". Now search that.
Really, the problem is that we still index and search by words, but your memory is rarely text-file quality. You remember ideas, and (if needed) your brain interpolates the gaps.
E.g., you may think you photographically remember your wife in her blue dress on the balcony in your honeymoon, but really you don't store a pixel array like that. The actual pixel array never even leaves the eyes, there's edge detection and contrast enhancement that's built right into the retina itself, to save bandwidth on the optic nerve. Then before it even makes it past the short term buffer, that scene is pruned, tokenized, etc, and you only really got an internal representation of the scene instead of the actual image. That's already missing a lot of information, like, for a start, everything that's outside the focus of attention. (While focusing on the blonde with great tits at the wheel, you completely lose such information as the license plate or even the pink gorilla doing cartwheels across the road.) You have a SEP field built-in, so to speak.
Then over time details or links get lost, and your brain just does a best-guess filling in the gaps. So over time you might remember that the wife's dress was blue, although it was green. Or maybe she wasn't wearing a dress at all on that day, and was in a t-shirt and jeans. Etc.
That goes double for remembering text. You rarely remember the actual text, unless you do rote memorization. But I'd rather not do that with all emails. If you had to actually remember the exact text describing the scene above, even if you remember the general scene, how many ways are there to say that she was wearing jeans? "Pants" works too, for a start. The shirt gets even funnier, because you might just remember it as a "shirt" instead of "t-shirt", and from there there are even more synonyms. "Blouse" and "top" come to mind, for example.
And that's when word-based search will fail you.
What we'd need is some search that's indexed by ideas. But until computers start to really understand natural language, we're kinda screwed. And I mean, understand what it _means_, not just parse English.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Here's the short version:
Turn it off. There is an appropriate time to be reading your e-mail, responding to instant messages, and texting your boss on your blackberry. And there is an appropriate time for work. Set those times in your schedule quite strictly. During that your work time, your e-mail is not open. Your blackberry is off. MSN is closed. You can probably expect to get three to four hours of this kind of time per day. Unless something is on fire, nothing is to interrupt you, and you can focus on what you're doing and be astoundingly effective and productive.
Once you're done, it's back to e-mail and MSN and constant interruptions. Or "team building" at the water cooler. Whatever.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
What a bunch of pussies. We all know that a quick answer isn't necessarily a good answer, but maybe only 10% of us have the balls to stick to our guns, and half of us are at risk of winding up on the unemployment line, because a defective "fast food" culture has gained ascendancy in office politics, much like McDonald's in the 1970s. Only later did the masses decide that burger stamped from 1000 different bulls (to paraphrase "Supersize Me") is not good for the constitution (either personal or corporate). I was only twelve when I first tasted a green Shamrock shake, and even then my palate was sophisticated enough to conclude that petrochemicals (to give those flavour additives the benefit of the doubt) were unfit for human consumption.
That's the present state of corporate email and IM culture: fast is good. Fast is actually crap, unless you are careful where you eat, but it will take another decade or so for backlash to recruit the unwashed. The average email response received in under 15 minutes is deep fried in hydrogenated soybean oil to a crispy golden colour. Yum, yum. Eat up and regurg, if you wish to see Santa arrive with your xmas bonus arrive in your neck of the cubical farm.
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it."
-- George Bernard Shaw