Blockchain Bachelor’s Thesis – Information Overload and Methods of its Elimination in the Modern Information Society: Going Through the Sources pt. 2.1.

Source

Previously published

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Introduction

Blockchainized Bachelor’s Thesis
Blockchainized Bachelor’s Thesis – Initial Brainstorm

Thesis

1. Preface

Sources

1. Battling Information Overload in the Information Age
2. The knowledge-attention-gap: Do we underestimate the problem of information overload in knowledge management?

Article

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SCHNEIDER, U. The knowledge-attention-gap: Do we underestimate the problem of information overload in knowledge management? JOURNAL OF UNIVERSAL COMPUTER SCIENCE. NEW YORK: SPRINGER-VERLAG [online] 2002, 8(5), 482-490. ISSN 0948-6968.

The knowledge-attention-gap: Do we underestimate the problem of information overload in knowledge management?

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„Thirdly, volume and speed in the shift in relevance, train and reinforce our capacity to shift attention rapidly but seem to weaken our capacity to concentrate on substance.“

Unlike the previously published source I extract from, this one is much more detailed and tries to tackle the very core of the problem. The author of the first one vaguely stated that as the amount of information increases, our processing capacity decreases without any proof. I already said that it is (from my point of view) very invalid. On the other hand, author of this source too realizes that something that we have learned in the past is atrophying, but he, instead of creating a generic shallow opinion, tries to tackles the very core problem that is lessening our potential processing capacity – the concentration.

Truth is that with the bigger amount of information, humanity now prefers shorter formed condensates of information, rather than the longer book-like versions. We tend to jump from one source to other one, which by nature should boost the atrophying speed of our ability to concentrate on one source for long. Also children now are literally growing up with smart medias, which as almost everything comes with various pros and cons. The children of the new generation will become the true “virtual inhabitants”, but on the other hand no educational system (whether the one enforced by state, nor parents themselves, teach children how to responsibly approach the virtual devices, or the virtual world itself. That may for example lead to the increased ADHD “illness”.

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“the ease with which we store, produce and diffuse knowledge*, despite of organizing features of office software, seems to result in a gradual disappearance of the most simple organisational capacities, so that related incidents, such as correspondence and details pertinent to meetings and conferences are stored in a dispersed or random way making it difficult for individuals fighting tough time schedules to retrieve and to reintegrate them.”

Truth be told, I’ll need to think more about this one. I’m not entirely convinced that our organisational capacities are disappearing. I think that the very opposite is true. Firstly, it is much harder to effectively organise information, since there is exponentially more of them than there used to be. In the past, most of the people didn’t even need to organise information, since the vast majority of them didn’t have much information. They only knew some necessary stuff and the means and motivation to acquire additional “bonus knowledge” was minimal. As the information spread to more people due to information explosions, more people were suddenly in need of better organisational skills. If my logical processes were correct, the implication would be that right now we face the difficult situation and need to adapt, mainly by teaching the information literacy more. Claiming that we got worse may be an invalid assumption.

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“Content providers as well as chief knowledge officers had to learn that production was not the bottleneck. There was no shortage of writers or senders but of readers and receivers, as reflected in the development of incentives: First everyone was rewarded who made a document available to others. Then, clicks were counted, so that senders learned to increase their ability to create attractive key words. Finally procedures of subjective evaluation were developed to capture the value created by any document made available on e-devices. In the end what should be rewarded, if at all, but that is another story, is the value created on markets to customers which we are still far from capturing.“

I do not yet know how this is relevant to the information overload, but it definitely is an interesting input. If I take the Steem as an example, then the statement is probably correct. We definitely lack curators more than the actual authors. That is though due to the fact that content creators get 75% of the cut, while curators get 25% of the cut. I agree that at first when internet was born, the content creators had to be rewarded a lot in order to create “the initial content”. The rewarding of the content was continuously developing and now there are zillions of possibilities (Blockchain extremely helps with that). Maybe if Steem rewarded the authors with 25% and curators with 75%, the author’s statement would be invalid. I think this can’t really be measured objectively. Every “rewarding system” sets its rules and people either play the game, or the systems dies.

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“Let’s now put the argument of not reinventing the wheel at its extreme: If a researcher were to include everything ever published on her subject historically and globally she would either have to push her subject to the extremest niche or end up reappraising for several years what is already out there. As the latter is neither inspiring nor conforms to the way we learn the world (that is by rediscovering) procedures have been developed to rationalise the exercise. So the researcher will only refer to a few mainstream and recent sources and select only those few aspects that help him make his point. Still, the official rule remains that researchers, standing on the shoulders of giants, as Newton said, are supposed to take existing knowledge into account while contributing invention and new thoughts. Growing older they learn that they are safe if they comply to referencing some salient works that become salient exactly because they fulfil the function as a substitute for profound search and study.“

EXACTLY THAT! This very much relates to my article about mental property. It is even now totally undoable. One can’t possibly go through all the materials relevant to the topic that one wants to write about. One is then left only with one option and that is to quote the mostly quoted articles that somehow sum up parts of the knowledge that have been gathered about any given topic. We than naturally reach the state, where we have no idea where was the idea firstly born. The whole processes of trying to find out everything that has been discovered would also naturally lead to a MASSIVE information overload. There must be though a healthy balance, because if we didn’t bother studying the previous ideas at all, we would just be reinventing the wheel all the time.

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„What happens is a general disequilibrium between the amount of information that is relevant to any task and is accessible, although at some transaction cost, and the amount of knowledge anyone is able to process thoroughly. How do people react to such an unbalanced reality? They start to work longer hours [Reich 2001] and doctors report that many suffer from stress or burnout which are counterproductive to innovative and independent thinking.“

And if we do not find the healthy balance, we have to reach the state where we have to extend the working hours. If we don’t use our processing capacity that much, we don’t have to fear prolonging our working hours, but if we do so WHEN our processing capacity is already depleted we will face the consequences in the form of stress or burnout.

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„As a second effect of information overload we can therefore state its function to make innovation less probable- again a contra-intuitive finding, as common wisdom would expect more access to information to result in more combinatory innovation.“

From my point of view this is a very strong conclusion. The amount of information enables us to be innovative and at the same time it immediately fires back with the information overload, which hinders our ability to reach those innovation. We made a transition from a state where it was hard to acquire the information in order to even be able to come up with innovation into a state where we have the information or can quite easily access it, but there is so much of it that we then have little energy left to come up with those innovative ideas. It seems like we now have to completely change the approach with which we want to reach those innovations. It seems like we have to undergo a lot of “information overload risks” to acquire as much information as we can, we need to learn how to effectively store it so we can “recreate” the information when we need to and we need to start finding the connections in-between those information later when we have replenished the energy.
The author also came to a conclusion that information overload has only 3 main effects. I will carefully consider them (I will probably agree with most of them), but I highly doubt that there are not more undesirable effects.

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