Digital Information Overload

Narratives

Narrative 1: Distracting Gadgets and Attention Deficits in Schools

"Now that computers are a staple in schools around the country, perhaps the machines should come with a warning label for teachers: 'Beware: Students may no longer hear a word you say.'

Today 80 percent of public schools have high-speed Internet access in at least one classroom, according to Market Data Retrieval, an education research company. Among colleges, 69 percent have classroom Internet access and 70 percent have wireless networks. Students start tapping away behind laptop lids with no way for professors to know if they are taking notes or checking Hotmail.

'I've never been in a lecture where I haven't seen someone checking their e-mail when they were supposed to be doing stuff,' said Bill Walsh, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Instant messages, news tickers and games like solitaire beckon too.

Joe Huber, the technology coordinator for the public schools in Greenwood, Ind., said that teachers routinely complain about gadget-distraction among students. 'It is a huge problem with anyone who teaches with any kind of technology,' he said.

Even in rooms without computers or Internet access, students have other devices to draw their attention away from academics. Cellphones may be prohibited at many schools, but that doesn't stop students from putting them on vibrate and trading text messages under their desks. That is, when they aren't fiddling with their organizers or music players. Teachers have started to fight back. All agree that the best weapon against attention deficit is the same one that worked before the dawn of computers: strong teaching. But new strategies don't hurt, either. Some teachers have found, in fact, that the best defense against the distractions of technology is other technology. Here are five examples of teachers who are fighting fire with fire."

Counter-strategies adopted by teachers:

- use of (interactive) games in classroom

- threat to reboot without saving assignment

- classroom layout that allows teacher to watch students' laptops screens (MIT)

- remote controlled student computers, e.g. with option to "freeze" operations when teacher explains

From Lisa Guernsey, When Gadgets Get in the Way, N.Y. Times, Aug. 19, 2004, at 1.

Narrative 2: Reliability of New Intermediaries

[- Wikipedia: John Seigenthaler (involvement in JFK's assassination), Adam Curry ("inventor" of podcasting), danah boyd (how to fix your own bio), Tron controversy]

Problems

Digital amnesia: somewhat counterintuitively to the common perception of information overload, huge amounts of information are simply forgotten or cannot be read anymore after some time (Stewart Brand: “Information lasts forever. Digital information lasts forever or for five years, whichever comes first.”); "digital dark age"

Reliability of new navigators: how to dissect relevant from irrelevant information? (see wikipedia cases)

"Digital me": fragmentation of audiences, implications for DNs' understanding of democracy (cp. Sunstein's Republic.com)

The Information Quality Challenge (adopted from Urs' essay draft):

a) information quality = “reference to a set of characteristics aimed at stating whether a ‘message’ meets the functional, cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical requirements of different stakeholders, such as information creators, administrators, users, experts, etc.”

b) Current safeguards for information quality apply mostly to traditional (mass-scale, demand-driven) media (dominated by small number of professionals in commercial, hierarchical, centralized media companies):

- Indirect ex ante regulation of broadcasting, for instance, in Europe

- Code of Practices (e.g. UK), Press Councils, Ombudsmen

- Code of Ethics, voluntarily adopted by news organizations and media companies

- Ex post interventions, like lawsuits against libel, defamation

c) Now, new modes of information production (large number of non-professionals involved; highly decentralized; different set of principles and motivations)

- Large-scale context shifts

- High level of access to information

- Quality assessment at the edges (users)

Alternative ways of framing the problem:

Attention as a scarce resource: problem can be framed as attention shortage, rather than information overload; how to allocate one's attention efficiently? (Franck, Goldhaber)

Adaptation to a new signaling environment: It seems that it is not necessarily the sheer increase in the amount of information and the diversity of sources that are the problem. For example, if someone put me in a helicopter and dropped me off in the middle of the Amazonian jungle, I would most likely suffer from severe information overload, too. Thus, another way of looking at the phenonemon could be through the lense of signaling theory. The adaptive challenge would be less in the tidal wave of information, but rather our ability to adequately interpret signals in online environments and differentiate reliable from deceptive signals. Judith Donath of MIT's Media Lab is writing a book on that approach.

Solutions

Markets

- Reputation systems

- Quality labels, trustmarks

Social Norms

- Codes of conduct for bloggers, transparency

- Policies and guidelines at Wikipedia, Netiquette

Code

- Rating, filtering (ICRA, content advisor)

- Syndication, content aggregators

Law

- Disclosure standards in health regulation (quality standards, procedural requirements, etc.)

- Truth-in-advertising regulation

- Right to correct wrong information

(Adopted from Urs' essay draft)

Relevant Research

Living and Working in the Information Society: Quality of Life in a Digital World (2003)

Eppler/Mengis: A Framework for Information Overload Research in Organizations (2003)

Franck: The Economy of Attention (1999)

Goldhaber: The Attention Economy and the Net (1997)

Lyman/Varian: How Much Information? 2003

Kimble/Grimshaw/Hildreth: The Role of Contextual Clues in the Creation of Information Overload (1998)

Schonfeld, CNN: A cure to the attention deficit online? (2006)

Gasser: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: An Essay on Information Quality Governance on the Internet (Draft 2006)