Information overload
Information overload (including information overload, Eng. Information overload or information flood) denotes the state of a person to have "too many" information about a topic in order to make a decision.
The English term information overload was coined in 1970 by Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock.
The expression commonly used in connection with different forms of network-based communication such as
- Social Media: blogs and microblogs (eg Twitter), content communities (eg Youtube ), social networks (eg Facebook), MMORPGs (eg World of Warcraft ), and virtual social worlds ( eg Second Life )
For e- mail information will be sent to the receiver in the sense of push communication, where messages as Carbon Copy can be sent to many recipients at the same time. Through this so-called post ( similar to a ' bulletin board, which makes information also partly publicly ) increases the total number of messages significantly. Large amounts ( "Flood " ) on old data to new data added, contradictions in existing data and a low signal -to-noise ratio, so high noise ( figuratively ), make it difficult to filter information ( = important from to separate the unimportant and interesting of uninteresting ). Ignorance of methods of comparing and work-up of information may increase this effect.
Online communities
Due to the limited depending on the person ability to process information, online communities are restricted in their activity. With an increasing number of contributions community members react with the ignoring of information, which reduce their contributions or the utter abandonment of the community; in those with high growth in membership rising emigration and the decline in premium numbers of current members was also observed, which is attributed beside the so-called social lounging of information overload as a counterpart to the network effect.
The effectiveness of information overload strongly depends on the respective software. It is about in communities that prevails asynchronous communication, for less regarded than in those with synchronous communication.
Quotes
" The flood of information generated by modern technology threatens their addressees to let sink into passivity. Seely Brown meets here a helpful distinction between information and communication. A plethora of information is not an incidental problem. Large amounts of raw data form a political fact. The growing amounts of data lead to a centralization of control. In the communication, however, the amount of information is reduced by the interaction of people and their interpretations. Edit and omission are procedures that result in a decentralization of communication. "