IEEE Internet Computing Special Issue on Information Overload

Search the Internet for the phrase “information overload definition,” and Google will return some 7,310,000 results (at the time of this writing). Bing gets 9,760,000 results for the same query. How is it possible for us to process that much data, to select the most interesting information sources, to summarize and combine different facets highlighted in the results, and to answer the questions we set out to ask? Information overload is present in everything we do on the Internet.Despite the number of occurrences of the term on the Internet, peer-reviewed literature offers only a few accurate definitions of information overload.Among them, we prefer the one that defines it as the situation that “occurs for an individual when the information processing demands on time (Information Load, IL) to perform interactionsand internal calculations exceed the supply or capacity of time available (Information Processing Capacity, IPC) for such processing.” In other words, when the information available exceeds the user’s ability to process it. This formal definition provides a measure that we can express algebraically as IL > IPC, offering a way for classifying and comparing the different situations in which the phenomenon occurs. But measuring IL and IPC is a complex task because they strictly depend on a set of factors involving both the individual and the information (such as the individual’s skill), as well as the motivations and goals behind the information request.Clay Shirky, who teaches at New York University, takes a different view, focusing on how we sift through the information that’s available to us. We’ve long had access to “more reading material than you could finish in a lifetime,” he says, and “there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.” But however we look at it, whether it’s too much production or failure in filtering, it’s a general and common problem, and information overload management requires the study and adoption of special, user- and context-dependent solutions.Due to the amount of information available that comes with no guarantee of importance, trust, or accuracy, the Internet’s growth has inevitably amplified preexisting information overload issues. Newspapers, TV networks, and press agencies form an interesting example of overload producers: they collectively make available hundreds of thousands of partially overlapping news articles each day. This large quantity gives rise to information overload in a “spatial” dimension — news articles about the same subject are published in different newspapers— and in a “temporal” dimension — news articles about the same topic are published and updated many times in a short time period.The effects of information overload include difficulty in making decisions due to time spent searching and processing information, inability to select among multiple information sources providing information about the same topic, and psychological issues concerning excessive interruptions generated by too many information sources. To put it colloquially, this excess of information stresses Internet users out.