Causes of Information Overload

Information Transmission

In an information society all people should have the right to information, which can enhance their lives. Out of the superbundance of available information, people need to be able to obtain specific information to meet a wide range of personal and business needs. Information overload has become a ‘fashionable’ problem today largely as a result of the way information and communication technologies have made it easier and easier to transfer information from one person to another and to make available ever-increasing information resources in almost every field. The technological infrastructure of the company as a whole is inadequate to the needs of modern information dissemination and information handling (Allen & Wilson, 2003). 

Accelerate of Creation                                                             

The main causes of information overload are the result of a number of developments that are mutually interdependent and relate to various levels or scales. 
These  developments  are mainly  the  accelerated   production
of information through institutions.

Organizational Design                    

People spend too much time looking for information. 38% of managers surveyed waste "substantial" amounts of time just looking for information. Factors such as the holding of files in different software formats and the speed of the internet at critical times of day contribute to this. Decisions are often delayed: 43% of respondents though that decisions were delayed and otherwise adversely affected by "analysis paralysis" or the existence of too much information. 47% of respondents said that information collection distracts them from their main responsibilities. They find it difficult to develop strategies for dealing with the information they retrieve. It is interesting to imagine the potential increase in productivity if all distractions were removed. (Waddington, 1996)

         

Technological Innovation                                                                                             

Information technology and its use or misuses are a major reason why information overload has become a critical issue in the 1980s and 1990s within many organizations. For some domains it seems obvious that information overload is an inevitable result of technological advancements and a subsequent characteristic of the current information revolution.  "The technological developments of the last 50 years have made more information more available to more people than at any other time in human history" (Feather, 1998).

 

Search Engine

The first attempt to deal with the information overload on the Web was the search engine. Search engines struggle to achieve the goals of recall and precision while dealing with the millions of pages and hundreds of millions of indexing terms contained within the World Wide Web. Search engines as they now exist represent a primitive efficient information access on the Internet.Electronic mail has become a popular means of communication within modern professional organaizationsElectronic maElectronic mail has become a popular means of communication within modern professional organaizationsil has become a popular means of communication within modern professional organaizations

Characteristics of Information