19-Sep Eppler, M.J. and Mengis, J. The concept of information overload: A review of literature from organization science, accounting, marketing, MIS, and related disciplines. The information society 20(5), pp. 325-344, 2004.
1 - Eppler and Mengis state that one of the countermeasures for information overload is ensuring that information is "visualized, compressed and aggregated" (334). I had always been skeptical of data visualization as anything other than a desperate attempt to manage a large volume of information all at once, but does visualization actually provide easily digestible chunks of information in a way that can be interpreted quickly and usefully?
2 - Overall, I'm intrigued by how this information can interact with tasks like information retrieval and search engine optimization. Is google just one big information overload zone? How can people working in say, a business environment, streamline the information accessible to people to help avoid information overload? What would starting a library in a business from the ground up look like if it were designed to prevent/avoid information overload?
In regards to your second question, I think that google helps to create problems of information overload in business settings. Google is pretty smart at figuring you what you want by entering text and not using search strategies like boolean constructs. I think this in turn leads many people to assume every search box, no matter what website or program it is in, has the intelligence of google. These programs often do not, which leads to information overload and frustration when a person can't find what they are looking for because they typed in too generic of a term. I know we have this problem at my current internship, where our users receive many useless hits in our digital asset management system because they enter too generic of words and do not use boolean searches correctly to narrow their results. I think there is a lot of frustration at search engines that aren't as smart as google now, as people don't realize that learning better search terms would be a countermeasure to information overload as our article suggests.
I think that libraries already have a great way to prevent information overload through subject terms. As we read in Paul and Baron's article, even keyword searches can provide too much information, so information that has already been grouped in thought-out subjects or taxonomies can help to pinpoint needed information. This is also a plug for our general field of study, but having a librarian or information professional in a company is necessary in helping reduce information overload. As we see countless times, technologies that help people find things digitally can still overburden them with content, so having an in-house specialist that understands the taxonomy or particular searching abilities of a technology is necessary to assist users that are being overloaded with too much information. I guess it reminds me of being that connecting link between people and technology.
1. Yes, information visualization definitely reinforce human cognition to digest the information. Data visualization usually uses sophisticated algorithms to provide higher level overview of the information and draw connections between different data set, which are hard to conceive interacting with the raw data. It already has many real world applications. For example, information dashboard helps the executives knows more about their organizations and make decisions in timely manner. But on the other hand, information visualization can also lead the user to draw wrong conclusions when using the wrong interface or presenting to the wrong audience.
1. Designers deal with interface to present information and carry out the communication intended. Helping the user cope with information overload is one big issue in usability and user experience design, so what’s the implication could be drawn from the author’s conceptual framework on information overload to the design field?
2. In the conceptual framework, “person" is treated as one individual. Our brain is plastic. After exposed to a different medium and different amount of information, we, as a species, would evolve and develop a new way to absorb information. For example, we tend to think shallower but much more broader than the people in the 18th century. So, is the conceptual framework broad enough and dynamic enough to take we humans as a single group and the evolution into account?
1. Eppler and Mengis list several explanations of the causes and symptoms of information overload. (Table 2, 328) These are usually assumed to be caused by stress factors in an environment. Is it possible for information overload to be deliberately used as a strategy such as in litigation, or by marketing, to fatigue a decision-maker’s faculties and produce a less-informed result?
2. One proposed countermeasure to information overload is to ensure that information is of high quality, that is, clearly presented and organized. (Eppler and Mengis, 331) How does one encourage the creation of clear information in an environment which might already be deluged with it and which the presenter is already tasked with reducing to a manageable flow? Should we teach more humanities courses?
3. Eppler and Mengis explain their criteria for narrowing their review in some detail. In particular, they utilized citations as a means of identifying key papers. (Epper and Mengis, 337) This method is useful for finding links among major research, but would it de-emphasize newer research which has not been as thoroughly absorbed into the canon? Is it enough that a paper links to previously written “key” papers?
1. Eppler and Mengis discuss the “limitations” of the scope of their article, stating that their aim was to “provide a broad overview of the main discourse elements in four business-related fields”, rather than focusing on a more specific subject area (341). While I understand the benefit of providing such a broad review, I feel that the different subject areas were largely glossed over. Should the authors have gone into more depth in each subject? Should they have narrowed their scope to provide a more detailed review about a limited subject area?
2. In their review, Eppler and Mengis present “testable models” which aim to identify what causes information overload and how to prevent it (334-7). The models typically involve questioning participants about their feelings during information overload in order to pinpoint causes, symptoms, and countermeasures. However, is information overload something that can be tested? As the article suggested, information overload is largely subjective and varies based on a variety of factors. Do those factors present too many independent variables? Is there benefit to trying to test something that is so subjective?
3. Eppler and Mengis summarize what information overload looks like in the marketing branch of the business field. They clarify that this research is also called “consumer research” and that, “generally, the research in the field of marketing focuses on the impact of information overload on decision quality, on decision time, and on the actual number of information items that can be processed in a typical purchase situation” (338). As a consumer, do you feel that information overload is a regular occurrence – be it commercials, in-store ads, print ads, etc…? Are there certain kinds of markets that have a higher risk of information overload, and do you feel those markets actually want consumers to feel overload?
I like the points you bring up in your second question. It seems incredibly difficult to test information overload. It is largely subjective. Moreover, it's such an intrinsic part of daily life I doubt many people think consciously about it. I also think it's still worth conducting a qualitative study on to try and get at the problem. I just think it will be difficult to come to any firm and overarching conclusions.
1.On page 331, Eppler & Mengis write that pull and push technologies can have positive or negative impacts in regards to information overload. I have never heard of pull and push technologies before. I believe I understand a push technology if I think of how listservs will send relevant information only to those for which it is important or necessary. What are examples of pull technologies?
2.The authors state in their methodology the keywords they used to find relevant articles. They also mention keyword synonyms that would also produce relevant articles, but they chose to not include them in their study as the difference in keywords indicated a lack of acceptance in the academic community which led to fewer citations. Do you agree with their methodology to leave out these scholarly works? Is it possible that these lesser cited works could have provided insights into the areas of study that the authors deemed lacked research? We talked in class of the general trend and dangers of citing the same works in a research field. Have these authors continued that trend by only focusing on majorly cited works?
1. Eppler and Mengis discuss the idea of information overload as resulting from subjective experience (p. 328). I feel stressed or upset, so even if its a small amount of information, I could experience the phenomenon of information overload. Are the more objective versus subjective theories behind information overload really separate, or does one lead to the other?
2. If human beings experience information overload now, what will it be like in the future? We have access to more and more information on a daily basis, but can we adapt to handle the flow of information? Have we already? Or is there a behind-the-scenes look to information, akin to the oompa loompas in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, where everything is kept running by some unknown factor. Will we be the oompa loompas of information when we graduate from the iSchool? I know that sounds funny, but what I mean to say is, how is all of this information kept flowing and growing? It sometimes boggles the mind.
3. This article was written in 2004. Since then, has information overload increased, or have we just found better ways to deal with it? Is the concept of information overload something that can be applied to society as a whole, like in the article on information inflation? That stated that there was just too much information for lawyers to successfully deal with. Is the entirety of the human race dealing with information overload on a daily basis, or is the concept of information overload in the article by Eppler and Mengis only targeted towards the individual?
2 - Your question about adapting to information overload has been the subject of several studies, but primarily as they relate to "multitasking," scholarship seems to think that we consider ourselves to be excellent multi-taskers, but in reality we're just deluding ourselves that constant access to email and the internet is enhancing our work instead of hindering it. That's why one of the new "be more productive" tactics suggested for employees is to avoid opening their email inbox for the first hour of work, as it keeps us from getting sidetracked. In response to informaton "flowing and growing," I think our non-stop multi-tasking can also be to blame. Someone emails me an interesting link, so then I post the link on facebook and twitter, and someone else picks it up and moves it along, etc. Oftentimes when articles and information go viral I wonder how many people are actually reading the piece in lieu of just hitting "re-tweet" or "share."
And the oompa-loompa metaphor, well, in spite of attending UT I don't look good in orange. Earlier I jokingly referred to information professionals as the tortoises holding up the world, a la the Hindu creation myth.
1) I wasn’t really clear on what Eppler and Mengis meant when they referred to “interdisciplinary teams” as being a possible cause for greater information overload among workers (330). What is a concrete example of an “interdisciplinary team,” and why would working with colleagues from other disciplines make it more difficult for someone to process information?
2) In discussing their methodology for narrowing the scope of their research, Eppler and Mengis say that they did not consider articles that didn’t refer to information overload by one of the four terms they favored (329). Their justification for this was that “these different terms… have not achieved wide acceptance within the scientific community and hence do not represent core contributions to this scientific debate.” (329) Is this a methodologically sound reason for eliminating these articles from consideration? Does the use of a less mainstream term for information overload really indicate that the researcher has nothing pertinent to say?
3) This article alludes to the existence of articles about information overload in the fields of library science and pedagogy, but does not include them because they are not considered pertinent to managerial science. Has a similar literature review ever been conducted on information overload in library and information science? Would a literature review conducted in this field follow a similar methodology to Eppler and Mengis, or are library and information professionals likely to have different priorities? What might the differences be?
1. On page 329, I am curious as to why Eppler and Mengis chose to eliminate from their methodology the 71 articles that discussed information overload in context such as “library and bibliographic research, documentation of large scale engineering designs, and students conducting research for their essays?” Surely those topics are pertinent to the topic of this paper especially since the title of this paper is “A Review of Literature from Organization Science, Accounting, Marketing, MIS, and Related Disciplines.” They said their aim was to approach information overload from an interdisciplinary approach, so why exclude these things, especially library and bibliographic research?
2. In the section “Countermeasures Against Information Overload” on page334, Simpson and Prusak say that “information overload can be reduced if efforts are made to assure that it is of high value and that it is delivered in the most convenient way and format.” I disagree, because ironically the more access we have to greater numbers of high quality sources it only makes it harder to make a decision about anything. More, despite the great quality, is not always better. Academic sources like EBSCOhost and JSTOR are such examples. When there are so many academically sound sources, information overload is usually bound to happen.
3. After reading this article, I think it can be safe to say that information overload at its root is a human problem. Someone could certainly build the fastest and most efficient system of finding aids for sources and there will always be someone who is overwhelmed by all the information put in front of them. With that negative statement, how can the information overload ever be lightened seeing as each case is approached millions of different ways depending on the individual person, field, system, or source?
1. In the paper, the authors identified a way to deal with information overload that to make the information visualized, compressed and aggregated. As a former webpage designer, one important principle in my mind similar to this idea is "less is more", which means that the less information you showed on the page with organized form the more the users can get. However, the information overall is booming from second to second while the human's capacity of understanding information remains as time passing by. Does it mean that the compression rate will be far more than the rate nowadays?
2. This paper shows up in 2004. From the point of view nowadays, it is hard to say the information at that time was overloaded. My question is How the information reduce in the way from its original size to the human brains?
3. In the paper, the authors rose a solution for assessing the information overload primarily by asking people what do they feel. I highly doubt it. From the sense of mine, I didn't feel anything uncommon regarding information overload. Could information overload really be measured by human senses? If it could, I think information overload had been come up thousands of years ago because even only a few fractions of information were beyond the understanding level of human beings at that age.
1. On page 330, the author talks about the causes of information overload. One of those is organizational design. The author says that better coordination through standards, common procedures, rules, or dedicated coordination centers (Galbraith, 1974) can reduce the IPR and positively influence the IPC. Is that true the more difficult the task is, the more people can learn more and increase their capability more? In my opinion, IPC can be affected by factors of information overload both in positive or negative way.
2. On page 331, the information itself is another important factor that cause information overload. And the characteristic such as the level of uncertainty associated with information and the level of ambiguity, novelty, complexity, and intensity can have great effects on the likelihood of information overload. Aren't these characteristics also influenced by receiver's background and knowledge? How can we define the boundary of which levels?
3. On page 337, the author shows us four publication timeline charts in accounting, marketing, organizational behavior and management information systems. The author gives us the authors of important discourse and the relation of them by displaying on a coordinate with time and empirical or conceptual. Would that be better if the author provided the keywords of these articles instead of the names of the authors? By doing this, we can better understanding the popular topic of information overload in each realm.
1. On page 331, the author lists the symptoms of information overload are 'a general lack of perspective', 'cognitive strain and stress', 'a greater tolerance for error', 'lower job satisfaction', and 'the inability to use information to make a decision'. The same page also cites the use and misuse of technology as a factor that causes information overload. However, the symptoms given also sound indicative of greater infrastructure problems in the institution... how many of these issues are related to employees not advancing in their career? Would not some of this be the result of staffers growing in expertise at working with information, only to find all they reap from it is more information to sort through? Is that also a potentially unexplored facet to this problem?
2. On Page 334, the concept of reducing information overload by presenting information in a form that is 'visualized, compressed and aggregated' and also 'of high value'. Aside from wondering who will make that judgment call (and who is going to be the one in meetings preventing people from killing time by rambling about irrelevant pieces of news), how is making a visual representation of the data supposed to alleviate the load? Also, much like the good and bad sides to email pointed out in earlier pages, there will always be some people who benefit from this method of conveying information, and others who won't respond to it positively. How can we first assure that the information we have is 'of high value', and then how we might best communicate it to others?
3. On page 340, it is recounted that accounting and marketing have more focus on empirical studies, and less on conceptual research, but organization science and MIS have the opposite problem (less empirical, more conceptual). With that in mind, has there been much cross-communication between these fields? In particular between MIS and marketing; both are just as service-oriented, in somewhat similar fashions. Clearly there's needs on both sides that could potentially be filled by the other.
1. Schick's definition of Information Overload ("Information overload occurs when the information-processing demands on time to perform interactions and internal calculations exceed the supply or capacity of time available for such processing") is unique to the others in that it implies that given enough time, the amount of information given to the person processing it can be processed and makes no mention of the ability of a person to process a given amount of information. Why is it that Schick decided to focus on a time requirement to completely process a set of information instead of also considering the ability of someone to process the given set of information? 2. It's interesting to me that Eppler and Mengis suggest that he reason there is little research done in the field of interdisciplinary information overload research is because of information overload. The authors provide that researchers have their own fields of study to stay current with and they don't have the capacity or time to devote to interdisciplinary information overload research. This doesn't seem like a terribly valid reason for the lack of research though. 3. The open research question that is raised in the last paragraph of this article (the ranking of causes and countermeasures of information overload) is one that would have been very helpful while working in my professional career. In my previous jobs, there have been many different professional disciplines with widely varying degrees of difference working together on a single project. Knowing the causes of and the countermeasures to information overload would have greatly improved communication between professions and departments.
1. Right at the beginning, on page 325, the authors note that "while this is not the first review article on the topic of information overload, it is the first one to analyze the problem of information overload across various management disciplines...," which immediately caused me to wonder how many have been written since, on what articles? Do any of these literature reviews take into account articles from a wider selection of fields (library and bibliographic research is named on page 329 as one avenue that was not included in this review because it is too "specific" for the authors' intentions here)? How would we go about finding these newer articles, or choosing our own parameters of fields or interdisciplinarity, to build upon this literature review (from 2004)?
2. On page 331, in their discussion of tasks and processes as a cause of information overload, the authors note that complex tasks increase information processing requirements (IPR), which is in turn aggravated by a reduced information processing capacity (IPC) "as a result of frequent context switching or distraction." Since I'm currently wading through RDA in a metadata class, I would like to think about how this problem is relevant to information professions, specifically libraries, archives, and cultural heritage institutions generally, and how some of the studies referenced in this article might impact design and standards for cataloging vis a vis usability (e.g. forcing users to repetitively use the "back" button versus designing filters and facets that can help them avoid single-track searching).
3. The brief discussion on pages 331 through 334, regarding symptoms of information overload, made me want to go back and search for the recent research debunking "multi-tasking," particularly the part on page 333 about how a person "has difficulties in identifying the relationship between details and the overall perspective, needs more time to reach a decision, and finally does not reach a decision of adequate accuracy." In fact, I would like to see this review incorporate more references to the original research in the field of pyschology, rather than vaguely pointing to certain foundational theories as "stolen" by the named authors (from other, mostly business-related fields) in the literature review.
1. On page 330, Martin concludes that an important factor influencing the occurrence of information overload is the organization design of a company. Centralization can lead to great IPRs, and on the other hand, better coordination can reduce the IPR and positively influence the IPC. Which model should we prefer or how could we balance them?
2. In this article, martin assume the individual’s IPC maintain the same. Is it too subject? I think it can be influenced by a lot of factors. The education, working experience, information skill or tool can make a difference on one’s capacity.
3. Information overload occurs when the supply exceeds the capacity. Dysfunctional consequences and a diminished decision quality are the result. Is it possible that, we could filter the information and focus on what we want, so the result of information overload will not happen?
1. If information overload depends on the capacity of a person to interpret the information,is it possible to give a concrete definition of information overload as the capacity of each person varies? When you consider the time factor with it, can we decide that a certain amount of information is excessive in a particular slot?
2. Information overload in the field of MIS is not given much importance, according to the author. MIS researchers are expected to produce effective countermeasures to resolve the problem of information overload instead of prodding much deeper into the root cause of the problem. My viewpoint is that only if a problem is analysed from the base, it can be completely resolved. What is the effectiveness of a temporary solution here?
3. While reading this article on information overload, another common phrase came to my mind,’spoilt for choice’. When there are numerous choices, it results in confusion and might lead to a wrong choice. Can this be compared to the concept of information overload? If there is too much information, it is always possible to interpret the false information as well.
1. When discussing their conceptual framework, Eppler and Mengis state that there is no possible solution for information overload and that it is an ongoing cycle. Are they right?
2. The authors set up three testable models based on their conceptual framework. In each of the models information overload was the dependent variable while the independent variables were cause, symptoms, and countermeasures. Please explain what dependent and independent variables are in experiments.
3. On the accounting timeline (Fig. 5), the authors claim the research is "almost exclusively empirical." To me the research appears to be very balanced between empirical and conceptual. Am I missing something?
1. Eppler and Mengis used different data visualization techniques to display their methodology, causes and symptoms of information overload, and the timeline of publications and citations on information overload for each discipline they explored. What is lost/gained with the visual display of the data they present in the article? Is data visualization the key to solving our problems with information overload as suggested, or is it just adding to the problem? 2. When I was reading about the subjective experience of information overload the associated feelings of “stress, confusion, pressure, anxiety, and low motivation” reminded me of symptoms of common mood disorders, such as depression. Has information overload become such a pervasive problem that it could become a diagnosable and treatable disorder? Will people have to medicate from the abundance of information stimuli in their environment, and if not how do we cope with the anxiety and stress of information overload? 3. In the conclusion of this article the authors state that there needs to be more interdisciplinary research on information overload and state that one approach to achieving this would be to create interdisciplinary journals. Earlier in the paper it is stated that a solution to information overload would be to review only high value and compact information. Is the creation of additional journals to encourage interdisciplinary research adding to the information overload or is it part of the solution? How do academics sort through the various journals and sources of new valuable information in their field if the selection to review from is constantly growing?
1. Eppler and Mengis mention in their article that information overload is subjective in that it deals with the issue of novelty. Do you believe that graphic design and info graphics could play a significant role in curbing the mass amounts of information being accumulated by humans in future or is there a significant amount of information lost in this process? I would love to explore more research comparing the retention rates of information based on visual vs. written communication techniques.
2. In the article Eppler and Mengis state that many of the studies investigating the problem of information overload are predominantly conceptual in basis. How would an empirical study be structured to investigate the issue of information overload if demographic characteristics like education and background differentiate your subjects? Is there a sound way of producing such studies without bias?
3. I am curious to what extent experiential knowledge plays a factor in our ability to retain and process information. In many of the articles we have read the authors talk about the shifts from manual labor to information work as a recent phenomena. To what extent does this shift affect our ability as humans to retain information when so much of our work is being mechanized and automated? I often wonder how much personal freedom and agency is lost in the process of displacing our knowledge and work to machines in an attempt to alleviate "burden"?
1. In this article, the author gives us several definitions of information overload in table 2(p328). From my point of view, it is true that information is overload. With the development of information technology, we indeed ‘receive too much information (p326)’, but I don’t think all the information we received is useful. I mean we may use internet to find and get more information, but at the same time, we don’t develop some technology to help us filter information and deal with information overload.
2. When talking about the causes of information overload, the author mentions 5 main reasons and ‘all five causes influence the two fundamental variables of information overload: … (IPC)… (IPR)…’ Then the author says ‘an important factor influencing the occurrence of information overload is the organizational design of a company’ (p330). I don’t agree with that. I think nowadays, no matter what the organizational design is, if the company wants to succeed, it should get as much information as it can. It means the IPR can hardly be decreased, so there should be information overload all the time whether the organization of company is good or not.
3. The author says that ‘surprisingly, MIS has not been the discipline that has dealt with information overload in the most extensive manner.’(p339). My major in undergraduate study is MIS. In my opinion, MIS is created to solve the problem of information overload. I learnt database, learnt how to develop information system, and all these is to help people manage and filter information, which means decrease the information overload.
1. In TABLE 1, authors summarized many overload situations and tried to classify them into three categories: Information retrieval, organization, and analysis process; Decision processes; Communication process. However, in my point of view, it was an unnecessary (even unreasonable) move. For instance, “Idea organization” could involve communication as well as information organization. When an article discussed one typical situation, like a meeting, it might include processes of information organizing, making a decision, as well as communication. Thus, it is unnecessary for the authors adding the three categories. Maybe they wanted to keep the three-line table but made no sense.
2. Since there were similar problems in other tables, such as Information characteristics and Information technology application might overlap each other in the TABLE 5, three testable models, which derived from the framework, cannot be reliable enough. I wonder is it a good way to build models? When authors developed these models, could the not-reasonable-enough categories be acceptable errors or serious mistakes? It is clear to demonstrate these literatures by classifying concepts into categories. If it raises acceptable errors, how can we minimize these errors?
3. In those figures of timeline, we can see conceptual articles made more contributions in early years and latest scholars pay more attention to writing empirical papers in the area of accounting while it was the opposite in the area of MIS. The trend might reflect the changing impact from information overload in an area. In addition, authors could make a timeline of publications and citations of information overload studies among the four (or more) areas as well because information overload can be a dependent topic and the figure might show us some facts in the interdisciplinary area.
Eppler made a conscious decision to look for publication dates after the advent of of the computer in the workplace, 1970. While narrowing down the era of review to the 1970s makes sense since computing allowed for a more readily available amount of information, would it have been beneficial at all to look at information overload or a related concept in the decades before or even farther back to give the concept a deeper foundation?
Eppler mentions improving the quality of information as helping the IPC of a person. While improving quality can certainly be done on an organizational level making it easier for people to process information, information outside of organization is a crap shoot of quality. Is it even possible to have quality information at all times or to at least reach a baseline of quality both inside organizations and outside?
The lack of research into interdisciplinary information overload is somewhat surprising to me. One would think involving multiple sources of information from varying disciplines would make for interesting studies into the concept of information overload. How does a single individual cope with that kind of incoming information and how do they process it without overloading themselves?
1. At the beginning of this article, the author introduces the classic way of explaining information overload which is from the angle of information processing, and it could be concluded from these definitions that information overload is judged by the information receivers. But is there any influence on the definition from information senders? To give an example, professors prepare materials and lectures for students, believing that all of those are necessary to explain the topic. Could it be seen as information overload, if few students can understand?
2. In my opinion, the format of information presented will also have an influence on information overload, since we all know that the information processing time must be different between printed information and digital information, or information organized in table and unorganized in text. So, it brings my second question that is whether information format belongs to one of the five factors?information itself? person receiving and processing? Or else?
3. By comparing the four timeline graphs, I found that the centralizing period of publications and citations of information overload studies in the areas of marketing and accounting was about ten years or more earlier than those of organization science and MIS. Is it occasionally? Or does it reflect that information overload firstly appeared in business trading fields? If so, why?Technology development?Global trading?Growing economy?
1. While the authors were weeding out articles there was a filtering technique and corresponding criteria that interested me: a. "... third, that information overload is a dominant and systematically addressed subject in the article and not just mentioned once or twice (resulting in a total of 168 articles)" p. 329. Was this a manual filtering technical or are we able to do this with software? They started with 205 articles - that's still a lot of articles to at least skim to see if information overload was the dominant topic. b. "These different terms, however, have not achieved wide acceptance within the scientific community and hence do not represent core contributions to this scientific debate" p. 329. Is this a sound justification? What if the topic is still very new and key terminology is still being developed or accepted? Just because they use a different term, the article can contribute to the debate? Is that overly harsh? I guess it just really depends on the topic of discussion.
2. The authors state: "As mentioned earlier, the focus of MIS researchers has been to propose effective countermeasures, and not to study the root causes of the problem or its contextual factors." p. 339. I’m confused as to how one can propose countermeasures to information overload without looking into the root causes or contextual factors. Also why so many conceptual papers, and why so little testing or observing if those suggested countermeasures are effective or not?
3. My place of employment has recently gone through many different email policies, all with storage capacities as the only factor of consideration. They have not considered that some co-worker’s projects are longer term than the retention policy allows. Now employees need to develop other ways of storing emails for reference. When going back and looking for a bit of information, that employee may have to search through various locations and systems/software. This adds to time/stress of the work. Information retrieval is also an important aspect of information overload and for certain types of information (such as email) retrieval methods and best practices for organization/retrieval might be the most important countermeasure for information overload.
1. I was surprised by the lack of discussion in this article about social media, and it's contribution to information overload. This is especially true for Table 1 (p. 327). If social media were to be included in one (or however many) of the table's three categories, which one(s) would be the most appropriate? 2. Another discussion I felt was missing from this review is how information management tools that are used as a countermeasure to information overload can themselves contribute to the overwhelm. Or, perhaps another way of looking at this is: are information management tools effective? If there is going to be a sense of overwhelm regardless, then what is gained by using these types of resources? 3. The authors put forth that recent studies suggest interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches are more of a cause then countermeasure to overload (p. 334). At the core of this idea, I can't help but wonder if the feeling of overload comes from the interdisciplinary approach itself, or rather the individual on the receiving end who may be forced to push their thinking and reform personal paradigms?
1. The authors state that it is impossible to completely solve the problem of information overload. The rationale that they give for this is that there are five different causes of information overload and that any solution that is applied to one of these problems would cause problems in the other causes. Do you agree with this idea that there is no comprehensive solution to Information overload? Would it not be possible to combine several different countermeasures that targeted different aspects of information overload into one large solution?
2. The authors of this article describe a model that they use to define information overload. This model describes the causes, symptoms, and countermeasures that make up information overload and how they interact. Is it possible to apply this model to the type of information overload we see in the Evans and the Paul and Baron articles that are occurring in a specific field? If not does this mean that there are more types of Information overload than the ones that this article describes?
3. One of the main conclusions of this article is that more interdisciplinary work on information overload across the disciplines of MIS, Accounting, Marketing, and Organizational Studies is needed. The rationale behind this conclusion is that each discipline’s weakness in this field of research can be compensated for by the strength of another discipline. Do you agree that it is better to solve their individual issues by working together rather than trying to fill these research holes on their own? Are there any other disciplines that you think they could work with?
1. This article portrays information overload in a rather negative, perhaps even frightening (like when they refer to minimizing the risks associated with information), light, and the authors do justify why, at an individual level, it may be something to avoid. My question, though, is do you think in general that information overload is a negative thing, like in the grand scheme of things and looking at information overload beyond the individual level?
2. The authors write that “the less a process is based on reoccurring routines and the more complex it is in terms of the configuration of step, the higher is the information load and the greater is the time pressure on the individual (331)”. This suggests to me that the best way to avoid information overload is by performing mundane, routine tasks? Is this truly what they are getting at, and if so, are there problems in this approach?
3. The authors suggest that an open research question could address the reciprocal effects of technological, personal, information-based, task-oriented and organizational changes, and I think this is an interesting concept and especially found myself curious in reading the article about how personal factors contribute to information overload. The authors address it, discussing how certain elements (stress, confusion, pressure, anxiety) can exacerbate information overload. Are these the only factors? What else might make one person more susceptible over another?
This statement strikes a good balance between simple language and nuance - "Information overload occurs when the information-processing requirements (information needed to complete a task) exceed the information-processing capacity (the quantity of information one can integrate into the decision-making process)."
MARC = MAchine Readable Cataloging. It's the standard used by most libraries for describing materials in their catalog. As a raw (not optimized for display) file, it looks like this: http://catalog.lib.utexas.edu/search~S29?/.b7763439/.b7763439/1%2C1%2C1%2CB/marc~b7763439
EAD = Encoded Archival Description. It's an xml standard for annotating archival finding aids for online access. EAD is only used in the US - most/all other countries use ISAD-G: General International Standard for Archival Description. Raw EAD xml looks like this: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utlac/00035/00035p1.xml
What if you run out of room for the physical objects before a customer places an order - should there be a time limit? Should customers just hold onto their items until it is time to be digitized and archived?
1. Eppler and Mengis’s article has enforced the idea that information overload is an inevitable aspect of contemporary life. They also conclude that an adequate systematic methodology of countermeasures to information overload is missing in the literature. Yet information overload is so multi-faceted and the ways in which we digest information are constantly changing. Is a singular methodology possible?
2. The discipline venn diagram is a wonderfully visual way to emphasize Eppler and Mengis’s argument that we must use a more interdisciplinary approach to the study of information overload. How might information specialists such as ourselves have a fresh perspective and approach to such research?
1. I wonder if information overload is something human beings can adapt to. I think that sounds sort of ridiculous in light of this article, and yet when I read about how new information technology is overwhelming adults in their various fields of business, I can’t help but wonder if children born in the digital age are experiencing the same thing.
2. In the countermeasures section, the authors mention intelligent information management systems, such as Decision Support Systems. How do these work? I thought one of the main problems of information overload was that information requires a human being to judge what stuff is worth considering and what is irrelevant.
3. It makes sense that time is a factor in information overload (pg 326). It’s not just a matter of how much information you need to process, but how much time you have in which to process it. The solutions offered thus all drive at making information processing more efficient. And yet I wonder if some things just take more time and benefit from having more time spent on them. Sometimes the best products of the human mind come from less efficient ways of thinking. How will this be accounted for?
1. To what extent should we expect/have we experienced technologies becoming extensions of ourselves? Might information overload be lessened/abated by further relying on essential technologies to store and process information for us? Albert Einstein, when asked if he knew the speed of sound, (purportedly) replied "I do not carry such information in my mind as it is readily available in books." Might we also rely on the technologies at our fingertips to help us manage the flood of information? Do these technologies increase instances of information overload?
2. Does there exist some kind of upper limit for the amount of information a person can contain? Might there be ways to increase this capacity in current or future generations?
3. In a time of increased information overload, how might the field of information studies adapt to new user needs or increased utilization?
1 - Eppler and Mengis state that one of the countermeasures for information overload is ensuring that information is "visualized, compressed and aggregated" (334). I had always been skeptical of data visualization as anything other than a desperate attempt to manage a large volume of information all at once, but does visualization actually provide easily digestible chunks of information in a way that can be interpreted quickly and usefully?
ReplyDelete2 - Overall, I'm intrigued by how this information can interact with tasks like information retrieval and search engine optimization. Is google just one big information overload zone? How can people working in say, a business environment, streamline the information accessible to people to help avoid information overload? What would starting a library in a business from the ground up look like if it were designed to prevent/avoid information overload?
In regards to your second question, I think that google helps to create problems of information overload in business settings. Google is pretty smart at figuring you what you want by entering text and not using search strategies like boolean constructs. I think this in turn leads many people to assume every search box, no matter what website or program it is in, has the intelligence of google. These programs often do not, which leads to information overload and frustration when a person can't find what they are looking for because they typed in too generic of a term. I know we have this problem at my current internship, where our users receive many useless hits in our digital asset management system because they enter too generic of words and do not use boolean searches correctly to narrow their results. I think there is a lot of frustration at search engines that aren't as smart as google now, as people don't realize that learning better search terms would be a countermeasure to information overload as our article suggests.
DeleteI think that libraries already have a great way to prevent information overload through subject terms. As we read in Paul and Baron's article, even keyword searches can provide too much information, so information that has already been grouped in thought-out subjects or taxonomies can help to pinpoint needed information. This is also a plug for our general field of study, but having a librarian or information professional in a company is necessary in helping reduce information overload. As we see countless times, technologies that help people find things digitally can still overburden them with content, so having an in-house specialist that understands the taxonomy or particular searching abilities of a technology is necessary to assist users that are being overloaded with too much information. I guess it reminds me of being that connecting link between people and technology.
1. Yes, information visualization definitely reinforce human cognition to digest the information. Data visualization usually uses sophisticated algorithms to provide higher level overview of the information and draw connections between different data set, which are hard to conceive interacting with the raw data. It already has many real world applications. For example, information dashboard helps the executives knows more about their organizations and make decisions in timely manner. But on the other hand, information visualization can also lead the user to draw wrong conclusions when using the wrong interface or presenting to the wrong audience.
Delete1. Designers deal with interface to present information and carry out the communication intended. Helping the user cope with information overload is one big issue in usability and user experience design, so what’s the implication could be drawn from the author’s conceptual framework on information overload to the design field?
ReplyDelete2. In the conceptual framework, “person" is treated as one individual. Our brain is plastic. After exposed to a different medium and different amount of information, we, as a species, would evolve and develop a new way to absorb information. For example, we tend to think shallower but much more broader than the people in the 18th century. So, is the conceptual framework broad enough and dynamic enough to take we humans as a single group and the evolution into account?
1. Eppler and Mengis list several explanations of the causes and symptoms of information overload. (Table 2, 328) These are usually assumed to be caused by stress factors in an environment. Is it possible for information overload to be deliberately used as a strategy such as in litigation, or by marketing, to fatigue a decision-maker’s faculties and produce a less-informed result?
ReplyDelete2. One proposed countermeasure to information overload is to ensure that information is of high quality, that is, clearly presented and organized. (Eppler and Mengis, 331) How does one encourage the creation of clear information in an environment which might already be deluged with it and which the presenter is already tasked with reducing to a manageable flow? Should we teach more humanities courses?
3. Eppler and Mengis explain their criteria for narrowing their review in some detail. In particular, they utilized citations as a means of identifying key papers. (Epper and Mengis, 337) This method is useful for finding links among major research, but would it de-emphasize newer research which has not been as thoroughly absorbed into the canon? Is it enough that a paper links to previously written “key” papers?
1. Eppler and Mengis discuss the “limitations” of the scope of their article, stating that their aim was to “provide a broad overview of the main discourse elements in four business-related fields”, rather than focusing on a more specific subject area (341). While I understand the benefit of providing such a broad review, I feel that the different subject areas were largely glossed over. Should the authors have gone into more depth in each subject? Should they have narrowed their scope to provide a more detailed review about a limited subject area?
ReplyDelete2. In their review, Eppler and Mengis present “testable models” which aim to identify what causes information overload and how to prevent it (334-7). The models typically involve questioning participants about their feelings during information overload in order to pinpoint causes, symptoms, and countermeasures. However, is information overload something that can be tested? As the article suggested, information overload is largely subjective and varies based on a variety of factors. Do those factors present too many independent variables? Is there benefit to trying to test something that is so subjective?
3. Eppler and Mengis summarize what information overload looks like in the marketing branch of the business field. They clarify that this research is also called “consumer research” and that, “generally, the research in the field of marketing focuses on the impact of information overload on decision quality, on decision time, and on the actual number of information items that can be processed in a typical purchase situation” (338). As a consumer, do you feel that information overload is a regular occurrence – be it commercials, in-store ads, print ads, etc…? Are there certain kinds of markets that have a higher risk of information overload, and do you feel those markets actually want consumers to feel overload?
I like the points you bring up in your second question. It seems incredibly difficult to test information overload. It is largely subjective. Moreover, it's such an intrinsic part of daily life I doubt many people think consciously about it. I also think it's still worth conducting a qualitative study on to try and get at the problem. I just think it will be difficult to come to any firm and overarching conclusions.
Delete1.On page 331, Eppler & Mengis write that pull and push technologies can have positive or negative impacts in regards to information overload. I have never heard of pull and push technologies before. I believe I understand a push technology if I think of how listservs will send relevant information only to those for which it is important or necessary. What are examples of pull technologies?
ReplyDelete2.The authors state in their methodology the keywords they used to find relevant articles. They also mention keyword synonyms that would also produce relevant articles, but they chose to not include them in their study as the difference in keywords indicated a lack of acceptance in the academic community which led to fewer citations. Do you agree with their methodology to leave out these scholarly works? Is it possible that these lesser cited works could have provided insights into the areas of study that the authors deemed lacked research? We talked in class of the general trend and dangers of citing the same works in a research field. Have these authors continued that trend by only focusing on majorly cited works?
1. Eppler and Mengis discuss the idea of information overload as resulting from subjective experience (p. 328). I feel stressed or upset, so even if its a small amount of information, I could experience the phenomenon of information overload. Are the more objective versus subjective theories behind information overload really separate, or does one lead to the other?
ReplyDelete2. If human beings experience information overload now, what will it be like in the future? We have access to more and more information on a daily basis, but can we adapt to handle the flow of information? Have we already? Or is there a behind-the-scenes look to information, akin to the oompa loompas in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, where everything is kept running by some unknown factor. Will we be the oompa loompas of information when we graduate from the iSchool? I know that sounds funny, but what I mean to say is, how is all of this information kept flowing and growing? It sometimes boggles the mind.
3. This article was written in 2004. Since then, has information overload increased, or have we just found better ways to deal with it? Is the concept of information overload something that can be applied to society as a whole, like in the article on information inflation? That stated that there was just too much information for lawyers to successfully deal with. Is the entirety of the human race dealing with information overload on a daily basis, or is the concept of information overload in the article by Eppler and Mengis only targeted towards the individual?
2 - Your question about adapting to information overload has been the subject of several studies, but primarily as they relate to "multitasking," scholarship seems to think that we consider ourselves to be excellent multi-taskers, but in reality we're just deluding ourselves that constant access to email and the internet is enhancing our work instead of hindering it. That's why one of the new "be more productive" tactics suggested for employees is to avoid opening their email inbox for the first hour of work, as it keeps us from getting sidetracked. In response to informaton "flowing and growing," I think our non-stop multi-tasking can also be to blame. Someone emails me an interesting link, so then I post the link on facebook and twitter, and someone else picks it up and moves it along, etc. Oftentimes when articles and information go viral I wonder how many people are actually reading the piece in lieu of just hitting "re-tweet" or "share."
DeleteAnd the oompa-loompa metaphor, well, in spite of attending UT I don't look good in orange. Earlier I jokingly referred to information professionals as the tortoises holding up the world, a la the Hindu creation myth.
1) I wasn’t really clear on what Eppler and Mengis meant when they referred to “interdisciplinary teams” as being a possible cause for greater information overload among workers (330). What is a concrete example of an “interdisciplinary team,” and why would working with colleagues from other disciplines make it more difficult for someone to process information?
ReplyDelete2) In discussing their methodology for narrowing the scope of their research, Eppler and Mengis say that they did not consider articles that didn’t refer to information overload by one of the four terms they favored (329). Their justification for this was that “these different terms… have not achieved wide acceptance within the scientific community and hence do not represent core contributions to this scientific debate.” (329) Is this a methodologically sound reason for eliminating these articles from consideration? Does the use of a less mainstream term for information overload really indicate that the researcher has nothing pertinent to say?
3) This article alludes to the existence of articles about information overload in the fields of library science and pedagogy, but does not include them because they are not considered pertinent to managerial science. Has a similar literature review ever been conducted on information overload in library and information science? Would a literature review conducted in this field follow a similar methodology to Eppler and Mengis, or are library and information professionals likely to have different priorities? What might the differences be?
1. On page 329, I am curious as to why Eppler and Mengis chose to eliminate from their methodology the 71 articles that discussed information overload in context such as “library and bibliographic research, documentation of large scale engineering designs, and students conducting research for their essays?” Surely those topics are pertinent to the topic of this paper especially since the title of this paper is “A Review of Literature from Organization Science, Accounting, Marketing, MIS, and Related Disciplines.” They said their aim was to approach information overload from an interdisciplinary approach, so why exclude these things, especially library and bibliographic research?
ReplyDelete2. In the section “Countermeasures Against Information Overload” on page334, Simpson and Prusak say that “information overload can be reduced if efforts are made to assure that it is of high value and that it is delivered in the most convenient way and format.” I disagree, because ironically the more access we have to greater numbers of high quality sources it only makes it harder to make a decision about anything. More, despite the great quality, is not always better. Academic sources like EBSCOhost and JSTOR are such examples. When there are so many academically sound sources, information overload is usually bound to happen.
3. After reading this article, I think it can be safe to say that information overload at its root is a human problem. Someone could certainly build the fastest and most efficient system of finding aids for sources and there will always be someone who is overwhelmed by all the information put in front of them. With that negative statement, how can the information overload ever be lightened seeing as each case is approached millions of different ways depending on the individual person, field, system, or source?
1. In the paper, the authors identified a way to deal with information overload that to make the information visualized, compressed and aggregated. As a former webpage designer, one important principle in my mind similar to this idea is "less is more", which means that the less information you showed on the page with organized form the more the users can get. However, the information overall is booming from second to second while the human's capacity of understanding information remains as time passing by. Does it mean that the compression rate will be far more than the rate nowadays?
ReplyDelete2. This paper shows up in 2004. From the point of view nowadays, it is hard to say the information at that time was overloaded. My question is How the information reduce in the way from its original size to the human brains?
3. In the paper, the authors rose a solution for assessing the information overload primarily by asking people what do they feel. I highly doubt it. From the sense of mine, I didn't feel anything uncommon regarding information overload. Could information overload really be measured by human senses? If it could, I think information overload had been come up thousands of years ago because even only a few fractions of information were beyond the understanding level of human beings at that age.
1. On page 330, the author talks about the causes of information overload. One of those is organizational design. The author says that better coordination through standards, common procedures, rules, or dedicated coordination centers (Galbraith, 1974) can reduce the IPR and positively influence the IPC. Is that true the more difficult the task is, the more people can learn more and increase their capability more? In my opinion, IPC can be affected by factors of information overload both in positive or negative way.
ReplyDelete2. On page 331, the information itself is another important factor that cause information overload. And the characteristic such as the level of uncertainty associated with information and the level of ambiguity, novelty, complexity, and intensity can have great effects on the likelihood of information overload. Aren't these characteristics also influenced by receiver's background and knowledge? How can we define the boundary of which levels?
3. On page 337, the author shows us four publication timeline charts in accounting, marketing, organizational behavior and management information systems. The author gives us the authors of important discourse and the relation of them by displaying on a coordinate with time and empirical or conceptual. Would that be better if the author provided the keywords of these articles instead of the names of the authors? By doing this, we can better understanding the popular topic of information overload in each realm.
1. On page 331, the author lists the symptoms of information overload are 'a general lack of perspective', 'cognitive strain and stress', 'a greater tolerance for error', 'lower job satisfaction', and 'the inability to use information to make a decision'. The same page also cites the use and misuse of technology as a factor that causes information overload. However, the symptoms given also sound indicative of greater infrastructure problems in the institution... how many of these issues are related to employees not advancing in their career? Would not some of this be the result of staffers growing in expertise at working with information, only to find all they reap from it is more information to sort through? Is that also a potentially unexplored facet to this problem?
ReplyDelete2. On Page 334, the concept of reducing information overload by presenting information in a form that is 'visualized, compressed and aggregated' and also 'of high value'. Aside from wondering who will make that judgment call (and who is going to be the one in meetings preventing people from killing time by rambling about irrelevant pieces of news), how is making a visual representation of the data supposed to alleviate the load? Also, much like the good and bad sides to email pointed out in earlier pages, there will always be some people who benefit from this method of conveying information, and others who won't respond to it positively. How can we first assure that the information we have is 'of high value', and then how we might best communicate it to others?
3. On page 340, it is recounted that accounting and marketing have more focus on empirical studies, and less on conceptual research, but organization science and MIS have the opposite problem (less empirical, more conceptual). With that in mind, has there been much cross-communication between these fields? In particular between MIS and marketing; both are just as service-oriented, in somewhat similar fashions. Clearly there's needs on both sides that could potentially be filled by the other.
1. Schick's definition of Information Overload ("Information overload occurs when the information-processing demands on time to perform interactions and internal calculations exceed the supply or capacity of time available for such processing") is unique to the others in that it implies that given enough time, the amount of information given to the person processing it can be processed and makes no mention of the ability of a person to process a given amount of information. Why is it that Schick decided to focus on a time requirement to completely process a set of information instead of also considering the ability of someone to process the given set of information?
ReplyDelete2. It's interesting to me that Eppler and Mengis suggest that he reason there is little research done in the field of interdisciplinary information overload research is because of information overload. The authors provide that researchers have their own fields of study to stay current with and they don't have the capacity or time to devote to interdisciplinary information overload research. This doesn't seem like a terribly valid reason for the lack of research though.
3. The open research question that is raised in the last paragraph of this article (the ranking of causes and countermeasures of information overload) is one that would have been very helpful while working in my professional career. In my previous jobs, there have been many different professional disciplines with widely varying degrees of difference working together on a single project. Knowing the causes of and the countermeasures to information overload would have greatly improved communication between professions and departments.
1. Right at the beginning, on page 325, the authors note that "while this is not the first review article on the topic of information overload, it is the first one to analyze the problem of information overload across various management disciplines...," which immediately caused me to wonder how many have been written since, on what articles? Do any of these literature reviews take into account articles from a wider selection of fields (library and bibliographic research is named on page 329 as one avenue that was not included in this review because it is too "specific" for the authors' intentions here)? How would we go about finding these newer articles, or choosing our own parameters of fields or interdisciplinarity, to build upon this literature review (from 2004)?
ReplyDelete2. On page 331, in their discussion of tasks and processes as a cause of information overload, the authors note that complex tasks increase information processing requirements (IPR), which is in turn aggravated by a reduced information processing capacity (IPC) "as a result of frequent context switching or distraction." Since I'm currently wading through RDA in a metadata class, I would like to think about how this problem is relevant to information professions, specifically libraries, archives, and cultural heritage institutions generally, and how some of the studies referenced in this article might impact design and standards for cataloging vis a vis usability (e.g. forcing users to repetitively use the "back" button versus designing filters and facets that can help them avoid single-track searching).
3. The brief discussion on pages 331 through 334, regarding symptoms of information overload, made me want to go back and search for the recent research debunking "multi-tasking," particularly the part on page 333 about how a person "has difficulties in identifying the relationship between details and the overall perspective, needs more time to reach a decision, and finally does not reach a decision of adequate accuracy." In fact, I would like to see this review incorporate more references to the original research in the field of pyschology, rather than vaguely pointing to certain foundational theories as "stolen" by the named authors (from other, mostly business-related fields) in the literature review.
1. On page 330, Martin concludes that an important factor influencing the occurrence of information overload is the organization design of a company. Centralization can lead to great IPRs, and on the other hand, better coordination can reduce the IPR and positively influence the IPC. Which model should we prefer or how could we balance them?
ReplyDelete2. In this article, martin assume the individual’s IPC maintain the same. Is it too subject? I think it can be influenced by a lot of factors. The education, working experience, information skill or tool can make a difference on one’s capacity.
3. Information overload occurs when the supply exceeds the capacity. Dysfunctional consequences and a diminished decision quality are the result. Is it possible that, we could filter the information and focus on what we want, so the result of information overload will not happen?
1. If information overload depends on the capacity of a person to interpret the information,is it possible to give a concrete definition of information overload as the capacity of each person varies? When you consider the time factor with it, can we decide that a certain amount of information is excessive in a particular slot?
ReplyDelete2. Information overload in the field of MIS is not given much importance, according to the author. MIS researchers are expected to produce effective countermeasures to resolve the problem of information overload instead of prodding much deeper into the root cause of the problem. My viewpoint is that only if a problem is analysed from the base, it can be completely resolved. What is the effectiveness of a temporary solution here?
3. While reading this article on information overload, another common phrase came to my mind,’spoilt for choice’. When there are numerous choices, it results in confusion and might lead to a wrong choice. Can this be compared to the concept of information overload? If there is too much information, it is always possible to interpret the false information as well.
1. When discussing their conceptual framework, Eppler and Mengis state that there is no possible solution for information overload and that it is an ongoing cycle. Are they right?
ReplyDelete2. The authors set up three testable models based on their conceptual framework. In each of the models information overload was the dependent variable while the independent variables were cause, symptoms, and countermeasures. Please explain what dependent and independent variables are in experiments.
3. On the accounting timeline (Fig. 5), the authors claim the research is "almost exclusively empirical." To me the research appears to be very balanced between empirical and conceptual. Am I missing something?
1. Eppler and Mengis used different data visualization techniques to display their methodology, causes and symptoms of information overload, and the timeline of publications and citations on information overload for each discipline they explored. What is lost/gained with the visual display of the data they present in the article? Is data visualization the key to solving our problems with information overload as suggested, or is it just adding to the problem?
ReplyDelete2. When I was reading about the subjective experience of information overload the associated feelings of “stress, confusion, pressure, anxiety, and low motivation” reminded me of symptoms of common mood disorders, such as depression. Has information overload become such a pervasive problem that it could become a diagnosable and treatable disorder? Will people have to medicate from the abundance of information stimuli in their environment, and if not how do we cope with the anxiety and stress of information overload?
3. In the conclusion of this article the authors state that there needs to be more interdisciplinary research on information overload and state that one approach to achieving this would be to create interdisciplinary journals. Earlier in the paper it is stated that a solution to information overload would be to review only high value and compact information. Is the creation of additional journals to encourage interdisciplinary research adding to the information overload or is it part of the solution? How do academics sort through the various journals and sources of new valuable information in their field if the selection to review from is constantly growing?
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ReplyDelete1. Eppler and Mengis mention in their article that information overload is subjective in that it deals with the issue of novelty. Do you believe that graphic design and info graphics could play a significant role in curbing the mass amounts of information being accumulated by humans in future or is there a significant amount of information lost in this process? I would love to explore more research comparing the retention rates of information based on visual vs. written communication techniques.
ReplyDelete2. In the article Eppler and Mengis state that many of the studies investigating the problem of information overload are predominantly conceptual in basis. How would an empirical study be structured to investigate the issue of information overload if demographic characteristics like education and background differentiate your subjects? Is there a sound way of producing such studies without bias?
3. I am curious to what extent experiential knowledge plays a factor in our ability to retain and process information. In many of the articles we have read the authors talk about the shifts from manual labor to information work as a recent phenomena. To what extent does this shift affect our ability as humans to retain information when so much of our work is being mechanized and automated? I often wonder how much personal freedom and agency is lost in the process of displacing our knowledge and work to machines in an attempt to alleviate "burden"?
1. In this article, the author gives us several definitions of information overload in table 2(p328). From my point of view, it is true that information is overload. With the development of information technology, we indeed ‘receive too much information (p326)’, but I don’t think all the information we received is useful. I mean we may use internet to find and get more information, but at the same time, we don’t develop some technology to help us filter information and deal with information overload.
ReplyDelete2. When talking about the causes of information overload, the author mentions 5 main reasons and ‘all five causes influence the two fundamental variables of information overload: … (IPC)… (IPR)…’ Then the author says ‘an important factor influencing the occurrence of information overload is the organizational design of a company’ (p330). I don’t agree with that. I think nowadays, no matter what the organizational design is, if the company wants to succeed, it should get as much information as it can. It means the IPR can hardly be decreased, so there should be information overload all the time whether the organization of company is good or not.
3. The author says that ‘surprisingly, MIS has not been the discipline that has dealt with information overload in the most extensive manner.’(p339). My major in undergraduate study is MIS. In my opinion, MIS is created to solve the problem of information overload. I learnt database, learnt how to develop information system, and all these is to help people manage and filter information, which means decrease the information overload.
1. In TABLE 1, authors summarized many overload situations and tried to classify them into three categories: Information retrieval, organization, and analysis process; Decision processes; Communication process. However, in my point of view, it was an unnecessary (even unreasonable) move. For instance, “Idea organization” could involve communication as well as information organization. When an article discussed one typical situation, like a meeting, it might include processes of information organizing, making a decision, as well as communication. Thus, it is unnecessary for the authors adding the three categories. Maybe they wanted to keep the three-line table but made no sense.
ReplyDelete2. Since there were similar problems in other tables, such as Information characteristics and Information technology application might overlap each other in the TABLE 5, three testable models, which derived from the framework, cannot be reliable enough. I wonder is it a good way to build models? When authors developed these models, could the not-reasonable-enough categories be acceptable errors or serious mistakes? It is clear to demonstrate these literatures by classifying concepts into categories. If it raises acceptable errors, how can we minimize these errors?
3. In those figures of timeline, we can see conceptual articles made more contributions in early years and latest scholars pay more attention to writing empirical papers in the area of accounting while it was the opposite in the area of MIS. The trend might reflect the changing impact from information overload in an area. In addition, authors could make a timeline of publications and citations of information overload studies among the four (or more) areas as well because information overload can be a dependent topic and the figure might show us some facts in the interdisciplinary area.
Eppler made a conscious decision to look for publication dates after the advent of of the computer in the workplace, 1970. While narrowing down the era of review to the 1970s makes sense since computing allowed for a more readily available amount of information, would it have been beneficial at all to look at information overload or a related concept in the decades before or even farther back to give the concept a deeper foundation?
ReplyDeleteEppler mentions improving the quality of information as helping the IPC of a person. While improving quality can certainly be done on an organizational level making it easier for people to process information, information outside of organization is a crap shoot of quality. Is it even possible to have quality information at all times or to at least reach a baseline of quality both inside organizations and outside?
The lack of research into interdisciplinary information overload is somewhat surprising to me. One would think involving multiple sources of information from varying disciplines would make for interesting studies into the concept of information overload. How does a single individual cope with that kind of incoming information and how do they process it without overloading themselves?
1. At the beginning of this article, the author introduces the classic way of explaining information overload which is from the angle of information processing, and it could be concluded from these definitions that information overload is judged by the information receivers. But is there any influence on the definition from information senders? To give an example, professors prepare materials and lectures for students, believing that all of those are necessary to explain the topic. Could it be seen as information overload, if few students can understand?
ReplyDelete2. In my opinion, the format of information presented will also have an influence on information overload, since we all know that the information processing time must be different between printed information and digital information, or information organized in table and unorganized in text. So, it brings my second question that is whether information format belongs to one of the five factors?information itself? person receiving and processing? Or else?
3. By comparing the four timeline graphs, I found that the centralizing period of publications and citations of information overload studies in the areas of marketing and accounting was about ten years or more earlier than those of organization science and MIS. Is it occasionally? Or does it reflect that information overload firstly appeared in business trading fields? If so, why?Technology development?Global trading?Growing economy?
1. While the authors were weeding out articles there was a filtering technique and corresponding criteria that interested me:
ReplyDeletea. "... third, that information overload is a dominant and systematically addressed subject in the article and not just mentioned once or twice (resulting in a total of 168 articles)" p. 329. Was this a manual filtering technical or are we able to do this with software? They started with 205 articles - that's still a lot of articles to at least skim to see if information overload was the dominant topic.
b. "These different terms, however, have not achieved wide acceptance within the scientific community and hence do not represent core contributions to this scientific debate" p. 329. Is this a sound justification? What if the topic is still very new and key terminology is still being developed or accepted? Just because they use a different term, the article can contribute to the debate? Is that overly harsh? I guess it just really depends on the topic of discussion.
2. The authors state: "As mentioned earlier, the focus of MIS researchers has been to propose effective countermeasures, and not to study the root causes of the problem or its contextual factors." p. 339. I’m confused as to how one can propose countermeasures to information overload without looking into the root causes or contextual factors. Also why so many conceptual papers, and why so little testing or observing if those suggested countermeasures are effective or not?
3. My place of employment has recently gone through many different email policies, all with storage capacities as the only factor of consideration. They have not considered that some co-worker’s projects are longer term than the retention policy allows. Now employees need to develop other ways of storing emails for reference. When going back and looking for a bit of information, that employee may have to search through various locations and systems/software. This adds to time/stress of the work. Information retrieval is also an important aspect of information overload and for certain types of information (such as email) retrieval methods and best practices for organization/retrieval might be the most important countermeasure for information overload.
1. I was surprised by the lack of discussion in this article about social media, and it's contribution to information overload. This is especially true for Table 1 (p. 327). If social media were to be included in one (or however many) of the table's three categories, which one(s) would be the most appropriate?
ReplyDelete2. Another discussion I felt was missing from this review is how information management tools that are used as a countermeasure to information overload can themselves contribute to the overwhelm. Or, perhaps another way of looking at this is: are information management tools effective? If there is going to be a sense of overwhelm regardless, then what is gained by using these types of resources?
3. The authors put forth that recent studies suggest interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches are more of a cause then countermeasure to overload (p. 334). At the core of this idea, I can't help but wonder if the feeling of overload comes from the interdisciplinary approach itself, or rather the individual on the receiving end who may be forced to push their thinking and reform personal paradigms?
1. The authors state that it is impossible to completely solve the problem of information overload. The rationale that they give for this is that there are five different causes of information overload and that any solution that is applied to one of these problems would cause problems in the other causes. Do you agree with this idea that there is no comprehensive solution to Information overload? Would it not be possible to combine several different countermeasures that targeted different aspects of information overload into one large solution?
ReplyDelete2. The authors of this article describe a model that they use to define information overload. This model describes the causes, symptoms, and countermeasures that make up information overload and how they interact. Is it possible to apply this model to the type of information overload we see in the Evans and the Paul and Baron articles that are occurring in a specific field? If not does this mean that there are more types of Information overload than the ones that this article describes?
3. One of the main conclusions of this article is that more interdisciplinary work on information overload across the disciplines of MIS, Accounting, Marketing, and Organizational Studies is needed. The rationale behind this conclusion is that each discipline’s weakness in this field of research can be compensated for by the strength of another discipline. Do you agree that it is better to solve their individual issues by working together rather than trying to fill these research holes on their own? Are there any other disciplines that you think they could work with?
1. This article portrays information overload in a rather negative, perhaps even frightening (like when they refer to minimizing the risks associated with information), light, and the authors do justify why, at an individual level, it may be something to avoid. My question, though, is do you think in general that information overload is a negative thing, like in the grand scheme of things and looking at information overload beyond the individual level?
ReplyDelete2. The authors write that “the less a process is based on reoccurring routines and the more complex it is in terms of the configuration of step, the higher is the information load and the greater is the time pressure on the individual (331)”. This suggests to me that the best way to avoid information overload is by performing mundane, routine tasks? Is this truly what they are getting at, and if so, are there problems in this approach?
3. The authors suggest that an open research question could address the reciprocal effects of technological, personal, information-based, task-oriented and organizational changes, and I think this is an interesting concept and especially found myself curious in reading the article about how personal factors contribute to information overload. The authors address it, discussing how certain elements (stress, confusion, pressure, anxiety) can exacerbate information overload. Are these the only factors? What else might make one person more susceptible over another?
How do we know if the original amount of information used to make the decision is even appropriate before "overload" happens?
ReplyDeleteThis statement strikes a good balance between simple language and nuance - "Information overload occurs when the information-processing requirements (information needed to complete a task) exceed the information-processing capacity (the quantity of information one can integrate into the decision-making process)."
ReplyDeleteWhat is MARC and EAD?
ReplyDeleteMARC = MAchine Readable Cataloging. It's the standard used by most libraries for describing materials in their catalog. As a raw (not optimized for display) file, it looks like this: http://catalog.lib.utexas.edu/search~S29?/.b7763439/.b7763439/1%2C1%2C1%2CB/marc~b7763439
DeleteEAD = Encoded Archival Description. It's an xml standard for annotating archival finding aids for online access. EAD is only used in the US - most/all other countries use ISAD-G: General International Standard for Archival Description. Raw EAD xml looks like this: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utlac/00035/00035p1.xml
Why is the term "customer" used instead of "user"? What makes the "user" a "customer"?
ReplyDeleteWhat if you run out of room for the physical objects before a customer places an order - should there be a time limit? Should customers just hold onto their items until it is time to be digitized and archived?
ReplyDelete1. Eppler and Mengis’s article has enforced the idea that information overload is an inevitable aspect of contemporary life. They also conclude that an adequate systematic methodology of countermeasures to information overload is missing in the literature. Yet information overload is so multi-faceted and the ways in which we digest information are constantly changing. Is a singular methodology possible?
ReplyDelete2. The discipline venn diagram is a wonderfully visual way to emphasize Eppler and Mengis’s argument that we must use a more interdisciplinary approach to the study of information overload. How might information specialists such as ourselves have a fresh perspective and approach to such research?
1. I wonder if information overload is something human beings can adapt to. I think that sounds sort of ridiculous in light of this article, and yet when I read about how new information technology is overwhelming adults in their various fields of business, I can’t help but wonder if children born in the digital age are experiencing the same thing.
ReplyDelete2. In the countermeasures section, the authors mention intelligent information management systems, such as Decision Support Systems. How do these work? I thought one of the main problems of information overload was that information requires a human being to judge what stuff is worth considering and what is irrelevant.
3. It makes sense that time is a factor in information overload (pg 326). It’s not just a matter of how much information you need to process, but how much time you have in which to process it. The solutions offered thus all drive at making information processing more efficient. And yet I wonder if some things just take more time and benefit from having more time spent on them. Sometimes the best products of the human mind come from less efficient ways of thinking. How will this be accounted for?
1. To what extent should we expect/have we experienced technologies becoming extensions of ourselves? Might information overload be lessened/abated by further relying on essential technologies to store and process information for us? Albert Einstein, when asked if he knew the speed of sound, (purportedly) replied "I do not carry such information in my mind as it is readily available in books." Might we also rely on the technologies at our fingertips to help us manage the flood of information? Do these technologies increase instances of information overload?
ReplyDelete2. Does there exist some kind of upper limit for the amount of information a person can contain? Might there be ways to increase this capacity in current or future generations?
3. In a time of increased information overload, how might the field of information studies adapt to new user needs or increased utilization?