The overload of information has become one of the common themes of the internet. According to an IDC study “By 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006.” ¹ A 2003 study, “How Much Information?” estimates that new information grew by about 30% a year from 1999 to 2002 and that “Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002.” ²

But is this really a problem? Clay Shirky comments in a talk “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure” that “if the problem doesn’t go away it is a fact.” ³ Complaining about the excess of information and the continuous growth of information is not new, it is a complaint that has been used for decades to position a solution. We all have the experience of their being too much to read and not enough time. It is the modern condition. Vannevar Bush used information overload as the problem to drive his essay, “As We May Think” in 1945.

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.

Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. (Vannevar Bush, As We May Think)

But just what is the problem with information overload? Would we complain that there are too many trees? What does it matter that there is more being written, pictured, and recorded than anyone can read? The excess itself can’t be a problem, it has to be the excess of things we are expected to read that is the problem. One way to look at it is through the lens of Thomas Homer-Dixon’s “The Ingenuity Gap”. To adapt his argument slightly the problem is the following:

• We fact significant challenges to our health, happiness, and lifestyle like climate change.
• There could be solutions to these problems if we have the ingenuity.
• Ingenuity applies knowledge (research) from across disciplines to big challenges in innovative ways.
• The amount of new research is driving the potentially ingenious to specialize further and further
• Specialization means that individual researchers know more about smaller and smaller fields
• Specialization means that no one has the scope of knowledge to be able to solve big challenges

The problem therefore is not the amount of knowledge it is the specialization of individuals and the inaccessibility when you need it of knowledge. A ingenious solution could be there, but those in charge of coming up with solutions won’t know about it because they are narrowly read and there is no way to find the solution.

Notes

¹ “The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe”, http://www.scribd.com/doc/2264647/The-Diverse-and-Exploding-Digital-Univ...EMC-IDC

² “How Much Information? 2003”, http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/

³ Clay Shirky. “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure”, http://web2expo.blip.tv/file/1277460/