Information overload in the Knowledge Economy

Posted Monday, June 16, 2008 at 12:57pm in Blogging  | 

Drew B points to an interesting article in the New York Times which tells the story of how some of the world’s largest technology firms are working together to help combat information overload. Microsoft, Google, Intel and IBM have joined forces to form a not-for-profit organisation which aims to “study the problem, publicize it and devise ways to help workers - theirs and others - cope with the digital deluge.”

Dealing with information overload isn’t a new phenomenon. I constantly read people’s blog posts or tweets declaring “email bankruptcy”. David Brain touched on the subject this time last year and discussed the amount of inputs he receives during the work week. His conclusion is spot on: “…if you are in PR the ability to be able to switch from ‘input and scanning’ mode to ‘focus and doing’ mode is an increasingly important skill.”

This skill is becoming harder to do. Each day we’re presented with numerous distractions in the form of emails, RSS feeds, newspaper/magazine articles, tweets, TV programmes, Facebook notifications, YouTube videos, instant messages, text messages, phone calls, meetings and countless other forms of communication. A Blackberry isn’t nicknamed a Crackberry for no reason.

The wealth of information that is presented to us on any given day is often overwhelming. According to the video, Shift Happens (see below), it’s estimated that a week’s read of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.

The easy solution would be to just ignore it all. Unsubscribe from all your feeds; don’t log into your instant message account; stop reading and writing tweets; cancel your Facebook account etc etc. But that would be a foolish step to take for those of us working in the Knowledge Economy. Although it is distracting, the information available is invaluable from a personal knowledge perspective to a wider business strategy and ‘moving-forward’ point of view.

In the realm of social media we’re also dealing with relationships. I now know hundreds of people from around the world who I would never have met or corresponded with because of it. This is great and is globalisation at is finest. But it’s not sustainable. It’s been proven that one person is limited to the number of relationships he or she can sustain. Sorry, but you don’t have 800 “friends” even if your Facebook profile says otherwise. :)

And therein lies the rub.

The topic of managing relationships is worthy of a blog post itself… No, make that a 200-page book, so I won’t try to tackle it here. I wouldn’t know how to anyway. Likewise, I wish I had a ‘10 Step Guide to Tackling Information Overload’ blog post for you, but I don’t. Being able to sort the wheat from the chaff (so to speak) in the knowledge economy is a arduous task and one that takes time, effort, skill and, perhaps most importantly, self-discipline.

Let’s hope Microsoft, Google, Intel and IBM can help us out a bit on this one.

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4 Comments

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Three Minutes « relentlessPR

Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 2:48am

[...] of information to be consumed how are you supposed to manage your consumption? Stephen Davies, of prblogger, recommends (with a tone of sarcasm) that we just stop, don’t read the latest blog post and [...]

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David Brain

Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 9:44am

I think we are all becomming our own copytasters. I remember my first job on a newspaper was to read the press releases that came in every morning. From this I developed an early appreeciation of what was in effect spam and bad PR . . though with some good stuff buried in there. I think we now all do that job every day using our own personal sense of what is important to us subject wise and who we trust to be interesting. It is a new fact of life. I still think the key is to be able to do the copytasting really quickly whilst expending as little real and emotional energy on it as possible. That you save for the inputs and people you really want to deal with. That’s the top skill. Learn it or die under the weight of stuff.

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Giles

Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 9:29pm

Loive the video, especially the B.G bit.

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Nathan Zeldes

Wednesday, June 18, 2008 at 10:44am

As to “a week’s read of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century” - that may be true (at least if you mean textual info), but is irrelevant to info overload. See my post on tis very point at http://blogs.intel.com/it/2007/07/candy_bar_overload.php

The problem of info overload is a major issue these days, which is why we’ve founded the non-profit mentioned in the NY Times; if you want to join the effort to solve it, come join us at http://www.iorgforum.org!

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