NYIT Library Blog

4 e-mail accounts, 3 social network profiles, 30 instant messages daily? Consider yourself average.

It is becoming more and more common to read stories and blog items dealing with what Steve Rubel has termed the attention crash. A great deal a skill is required as a researcher when it comes to sorting through noise in an effort to find the signal that you are looking for. Librarians like to refer to this as the process of becoming information literate; increasingly, this more akin to a lifelong learning skill.

The Read Write Web’s latest entry, Info Overload: The Problem, provides a succinct two part overview of the issue, considering both societal costs as well as strategies for overcoming the situation.

“Information overload is no longer a joke. For those who suffered with this affliction, it never was, but now that there are real numbers attached to the problem, it has finally prompted companies to take action. Those numbers come from a recent study by a research company called Basex and they are to the tune of $650 billion in wasted productivity. Ironically, the time wasted comes from use of applications and technologies that are supposed to make workers more productive. Unfortunately, they seem to have the opposite effect.” [Link]