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Information Overload No Problem For Most Americans: Survey (reuters.com)
About 20 percent of American adults feel the burden of information overload, with that figure at least doubling among those from poorer or less educated backgrounds, Pew Research Center said in a new report. Reuters adds: "Generally, Americans appreciate lots of information and access to it," said the report into how U.S. adults cope with information demands. Roughly four in five Americans agree that they are confident about using the internet to keep up with information demands, that a lot of information gives them a feeling of more control over their lives, and that they can easily determine what information is trustworthy. Americans who are 65 or older, have a high school diploma or less and earn less than $30,000 a year are more likely to say they face a glut of information. Eighty-four percent of Americans with online access through three sources -- home broadband, smartphone and tablet computer -- say they like having so much information available. By contrast, 55 percent of those with no online source felt overwhelmed by the amount of possible information.
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We've become like hummingbirds, flitting from one information source to the next.
No longer do we take the time to digest the information we gather.
http://xkcd.com/1227/
The rest ignored the survey because they were too busy being overloaded by more important problems.
Most people not only can't distinguish signal from noise they don't want to. Hence the new promise from the major sources of noise to squash Fake News really only applies to that other side of the false dichotomy.
it's hard to be overloaded by a 1000W Floodlight, if you're blind...
...that a lot of information gives them a feeling of more control over their lives, and that they can easily determine what information is trustworthy.
The fact that most of them get suckered with fake news proves that wrong. And even then, it's a bitch to even fact check decent news sources these days - they get it wrong, too sometimes.
And lastly as far as information overload - I feel it. It's just too much and most of it is just noise. The media beats shit to death to the point of ignoring other things. For example, Trump's tweet on the new Air Force One is getting more news exposure than it deserves. I'd like to know more about WTF Congress is up to NOW and what their planning for the beginning of next year - that is what concerns me.
But that's what the sheeple want to hear - I can't blame the media. The sheeple want entertainment and they don't really care about the boring stuff.
"...they can easily determine what information is trustworthy."
Confirmation bias is a wonderful thing isn't it? No need to let anything bother you, just pick the "facts" that confirm your views.
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It's no problem because Americans are becoming increasingly comfortable with cherry picking their preferred "information" and discarding the rest, and critical thinking is considered "PC" and thus shunned.
"that they can easily determine what information is trustworthy"
Somehow, I doubt the correctness of the determination - a lot of people I know still trust news because insert-big-name-news-corp says so. That is hardly any test of trustworthiness of information.
I just implemented some code that calculates normal distribution parameters in a streaming fashion - I searched on the internet before implementing anything. A lot of the first few solutions presented by search engines were outright wrong - i.e., the results were incorrect.
People are bad at telling if they're overloaded. The fact that only 20% self-report as overloaded is pretty unsurprising. But look at the way people choose the news that they prefer. That's an actual example of them being overloaded by (mis?)information and unable to handle it. Way more than 20% of people are unable to synthesize enough information to have a clear view of what's real and what's not.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
According to TFS, "Roughly four in five Americans agree that ... they can easily determine what information is trustworthy."
Considering how many Americans only use their computers to access Facebook and email, that "4 out of 5" claim seems unlikely. What seems more likely is that "4 out of 5 Americans have no idea what information is trustworthy because they get said information from social media."
The cure to information overload was informatively posed to Slashdot and a number of other websites on April 01, 2006. If I remember correctly the solution was, er, um, something...
https://slashdot.org/story/06/04/01/1723245/the-cure-for-information-overload
I don't mind information overload, because I can quickly skim or toss aside anything I don't find valuable. Computers are pretty good at helping me refine a lot of information.
More troubling is possibility overload, that is the plethora of tools around that let us create amazing websites or apps or images... there are so many choices now that I often get caught in paralysis where I spend so much time trying to decide what tool to use I end up doing nothing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
you know the one where X percentage of all statistics are made up. Wasn't it something like 73%...yeah 4 out of 5 Americans my ass.
I agree, and I have always hated that aspect of social media. No FB for me. I was on Instagram for a couple of years, but I started to feel like I couldn't keep up. One day I noticed I was like a chicken, always having to peck peck peck at my phone. So I just stopped. Haven't been on IG for a few months now, and quite honestly I know I am not missing anything important.
If you don't read the news, you are uninformed.
If you read the news, you are misinformed.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Determining fake news is somewhere between NP complete and undecidable in the worst case.
Where there is reason to lie, liars will do whatever it takes to catch some people out.
Did this sentence..
..strike anyone else as a weirdly alien concept of what the word "source" means? It's so incomprehensible, that I can't even say for sure that it's wrong!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
"they like having so much information available"
Says the dink floating into my lane while they take a break from operating a ton of steel at velocity to read/type a message.
Yes, lots of Americans say that they're OK with it. Abused wives often say they're OK with their husbands for years. And what of those opinion poll predictions of a landslide victory for Clinton in the 2016 election?
At the same time, when we actually test people's abilities, the picture looks very different. Only a small minority can effectively look stuff up on the web and find out whether the information is valid and reliable (OECD, 2016), and 25% of university students can't distinguish between meaningless strings of nice sounding expressions generated by an algorithm and actually meaningful sentences (Pennycook, et. al., 2015).
References
OECD. (2016). Skills Matter: Further Results from the Survey of Adult Skills. Paris: OECD Publishing. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789...
Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J. A., Barr, N., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2015). On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit. ResearchGate, 10(6), 549–563. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/p...
Surround people with tons of information and see how much & what type they remember.
We are bombarded with so much information that we are all trained to ignore the vast majority of it just to function; I'd be interested in seeing how our brains decide what to ignore.
I would think information overload would be less of an issue for the more youthful demographic. I am 40 and have had to get used to more information. My new work from home tech support job requires 4 monitors. Yike, that can be overwhelming for a guy used to doing the same job with one or two. I am just finally, after 5 working days, am getting used to navigating that way of getting work done. I don't really 'LIKE' it yet but it is slowly growing on me. I really dislike the information overload and I have to force myself to stop multitasking by keeping my smartphone in a different part of the house so that I'm not using it while watching TV. I really have to do the same for my laptop. I guess the psychologists are right when they say that the information stimuli is kind of addictive. Yikes!
Having a lot of information from the same source will probably entrap the consumer in a cognitive bubble. Diversity of sources is the important point.
Sure, most everyone feels they are capable of discerning which information is trustworthy. But is this actually the case? I'd like to see a study where this is actually tested. Instead, it seems that the abundance of information is making people *less* capable of filtering the wheat from the chaff. Just look at all the Facebook posts that get liked, shared, and spread - a huge amount (possibly the majority of the ones I see) are based on paranoia, viral memes, and sources that are most definitely not newsworthy. The past US election should be adequate proof of that.
Just because someone feels they are capable of something doesn't make it necessarily true.
when I spend half my day reading Slashdot and the like. But lately it seems to have been taken over by trumpytrolls, so there is hope I can soon go back to having a life.
Whether this survey actually shows what they think it does, is perhaps not clear, but humans and in fact all animals have evolved to deal with information overload; we don't really take in all the sensory stimuli that hit us all the time - we have found ways to cut down on things and focus on what is important. The challenge with the internet lies in finding the right filtering method, so we get the things that are actually important, rather than the things we would like to see. In all honesty, it is probably something all of us need to work more on all the time; but some seem to choose not to.
The overload is primarily due to a collapse of the Signal-To-Noise ratio. It takes a lot of work and will power to filter out the crap and the lies.
Which reminds me, speaking of noise and lies: please stop calling that shit "Fake News." Fake news is what The Onion publishes. Breitbart publishes blatant lies. There's a difference.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I'm a programmer who would like to get into robotics and AI. I've been working on an electronics certification, as well as studying neural nets / machine learning. Along with that, I've joined several (ok, many) groups and email lists. I've found that I can't keep up, so have been quickly reducing my number of subscriptions.
Also, I used to be much more of an avid news reader than I am now. I have found that the bias has increased from most sources and the veracity is much more in question. Therefore, I have drastically cut down, especially on mainstream news. It seems there's a lot more opinion now than actual checked factual information (many articles have none of that).