Knowledge Management: On Information Overload (Quotes)

"The total amount which may be transmitted is proportional to the product of the frequency range which if transmitted and the time which is available for the transmission." (Ralph V L Hartley, "Transmission of Information" Bell System Technical journal vol. 7, 1928)

"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense." (Gertrude Stein, "Reflection on the Atomic Bomb", 1946)

"Every person seems to have a limited capacity to assimilate information, and if it is presented to him too rapidly and without adequate repetition, this capacity will be exceeded and communication will break down." (R Duncan Luce, "Developments in Mathematical Psychology", 1960)

"Information overload occurs when the amount of input to a system exceeds its processing capacity. Decision makers have fairly limited cognitive processing capacity. Consequently, when information overload occurs, it is likely that a reduction in decision quality will occur." (Bertram Gross, "The Managing of Organizations", 1964)

"My experience indicates that most managers receive much more data (if not information) than they can possibly absorb even if they spend all of their time trying to do so. Hence they already suffer from an information overload." (Russell L Ackoff, "Management misinformation systems", 1967)

"One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with." (Marshall McLuhan, "The Best of Ideas", 1967)

"Unless the information overload to which managers are subjected is reduced, any additional information made available by an MIS cannot be expected to be used effectively." (Russell L Ackoff, "Management misinformation systems", 1967)

"People today are in danger of drowning in information; but, because they have been taught that information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be. If they could handle information, they would not have to drown at all." (Idries Shah, "Reflections", 1968)

"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition."(Marshall McLuhan, "Counterblast", 1969)

"We live in and age of hyper-awareness, our senses extend around the globe, but it's the case of aesthetic overload: our technical zeal has outstripped our psychic capacity to cope with the influx of information." (Gene Youngblood, "Expanded Cinema", 1970)

“[...] in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." (Herbert Simon, "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World", 1971)

"Everyone spoke of an information overload, but what there was in fact was a non-information overload." (Richard S Wurman, "What-If, Could-Be", 1976)

"We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge." (John Naisbitt, "Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives", 1982)

"In the Information Age, the first step to sanity is FILTERING. Filter the information: extract for knowledge. Filter first for substance. Filter second for significance. […] Filter third for reliability. […] Filter fourth for completeness." (Marc Stiegler, "David’s Sling", 1988)

"Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data." (John Naisbit, "Re-Inventing the Corporation", 1988)

"Information networks straddle the world. Nothing remains concealed. But the sheer volume of information dissolves the information. We are unable to take it all in." (Günther Grass, [interview] 1990)

"What about confusing clutter? Information overload? Doesn't data have to be ‘boiled down’ and  ‘simplified’? These common questions miss the point, for the quantity of detail is an issue completely separate from the difficulty of reading. Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information." (Edward R Tufte, "Envisioning Information", 1990)

"Traditional ways to deal with information - reading, listening, writing, talking - are painfully slow in comparison to 'viewing the big picture'. Those who survive information overload will be those who search for information with broadband thinking but apply it with a single-minded focus." (Kathryn Alesandrini, "Survive Information Overload: The 7 Best Ways to Manage Your Workload by Seeing the Big Picture", 1992)

"'Point of view' is that quintessentially human solution to information overload, an intuitive process of reducing things to an essential relevant and manageable minimum. [...] In a world of hyperabundant content, point of view will become the scarcest of resources." (Paul Saffo, "It's The Context, Stupid" by Paul Saffo, 1994) 

"We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning." (Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and simulation", 1994)

"It has become evident time and again that when events become too complex and move too rapidly as appears to be the case today, human beings become demonstrably less able to cope." (Alan Greenspan, "The Structure of the International Financial System", 1998)

"Specialization, once a maneuver methodically to collect information, now is a manifestation of information overloads. The role of information has changed. Once justified as a means of comprehending the world, it now generates a conflicting and contradictory, fleeting and fragmentation field of disconnected and undigested data." (Stelarc, From Psycho-Body to Cyber-Systems: Images as Post-human Entities, 1998)

"We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely." (Edward O Wilson, "Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge", 1998)

"One distinguishing feature of contemporary culture in America is that information is consumed for diversion rather than for consequential purposes. Paradoxically, in other words, information of all kinds is processed as low-level cognitive distraction, a form of mass entertainment. The collapsing of news, data, broadcast, and leisure media has resulted in an entertainment culture where the act of consuming information is as diversionary as watching a variety show or a situation comedy. [...] The simple term 'information' may no longer be adequate to describe the spectrum of input available to human beings in their capacities as data processors. (Joseph Urgo, "In the Age of Distraction", 2000)

"The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it." (Nassim N Taleb, "Fooled by Randomness", 2001)

"We all would like to know more and, at the same time, to receive less information. In fact, the problem of a worker in today's knowledge industry is not the scarcity of information but its excess. The same holds for professionals: just think of a physician or an executive, constantly bombarded by information that is at best irrelevant. In order to learn anything we need time. And to make time we must use information filters allowing us to ignore most of the information aimed at us. We must ignore much to learn a little."(Mario Bunge, "Philosophy in Crisis: The Need for Reconstruction", 2001)

"One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews" , 2003)

"What’s next for technology and design? A lot less thinking about technology for technology’s sake, and a lot more thinking about design. Art humanizes technology and makes it understandable. Design is needed to make sense of information overload. It is why art and design will rise in importance during this century as we try to make sense of all the possibilities that digital technology now affords." (John Maeda, "Why Apple Leads the Way in Design", 2010) 

"The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have 'too much information' is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest." (Nate Silver, "The Signal and the Noise", 2012)

"Complexity has the propensity to overload systems, making the relevance of a particular piece of information not statistically significant. And when an array of mind-numbing factors is added into the equation, theory and models rarely conform to reality." (Lawrence K Samuels, "Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action", 2013)

"Even if virtual worlds were tabula rasa, we are encumbered with a great deal of cognitive baggage. Our brains are hardwired with many mental shortcuts to help us make sense of the world. We simply do not have the time to carefully process every piece of information that comes our way. To cope with this inundation of information, our brains have developed automated heuristics that filter and preprocess this information for us. Thus, when we encounter new media and technological devices, we fall back on the existing rules and norms we know." (Nick Yee, "The Proteus Paradox", 2014)

"In this time of 'information overload', people do not need more information. They want a story they can relate to." (Maarten Schafer, "Around the World in 80 Brands", 2014)

"Our needs going forward will be best served by how we make use of not just this data but all data. We live in an era of Big Data. The world has seen an explosion of information in the past decades, so much so that people and institutions now struggle to keep pace. In fact, one of the reasons for the attachment to the simplicity of our indicators may be an inverse reaction to the sheer and bewildering volume of information most of us are bombarded by on a daily basis. […] The lesson for a world of Big Data is that in an environment with excessive information, people may gravitate toward answers that simplify reality rather than embrace the sheer complexity of it." (Zachary Karabell, "The Leading Indicators: A short history of the numbers that rule our world", 2014)

"Today, technology has lowered the barrier for others to share their opinion about what we should be focusing on. It is not just information overload; it is opinion overload." (Greg McKeown, "Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less", 2014)

"There is so much information that our ability to focus on any piece of it is interrupted by other information, so that we bathe in information but hardly absorb or analyse it. Data are interrupted by other data before we've thought about the first round, and contemplating three streams of data at once may be a way to think about none of them." (Rebecca Solnit, "The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness", 2014)

"While having information is a crucial first step, more information isn't necessarily better. Take a look at your bookshelves and the list of seminars you have attended. If you have read more than one book about a subject or attended more than one seminar but still haven’t reached your goals, then your problem is not lack of information but rather lack of implementation." (Gudjon Bergmann)