Information overload and information underuse

Hyperaction through Hypercomprehension and Hyperdrive: necessary complement to hypertext proliferation in hypersociety (Part #2)

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Nothing further needs to be said about the proliferation of information in a knowledge society. The theme of "Information Overload and Information Underuse" was a focus of a United Nations University project in 1985 -- prior to the development of the web. With the web, the challenge of "hyperconnectivity" has become more evident. Hyperconnectivity is the enabling technology that has been responsible for the success of the web in making the internet accessible to all (cf Mark A. Sportack et al. High-Performance Networking Unleashed, 1997). The challenge will certainly increase with the emergence of the semantic web.

Opportunity and solicitation: Now that many individuals and groups can create websites, there is the opportunity of visiting such sites -- possibly in response to solicitation by them -- as indicated by invitations to:

• visit a site,
• provide a link to a site
• visit a wiki, blog, etc and make comments
• read "my book", "that book", "that document"
• hear "my song"
• see "my etchings", photos, etc
• interact in my world, framework, etc

Increasingly we are faced with a knowledge space of innumerable wikis, listservs, blogs (>27 million), etc all somewhat desperately seeking and inviting input. These knowledge "space ships", whatever their size, orbit, trajectory or mobility, are successful to highly varying degrees at "flitting" or "trundling" around the universe -- imaginatively prefigured by science fiction media representations (Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, Star Trek) . Many may attract no visitors over extended periods -- as isolates in the knowledge universe. Others may be the subject of automated cross-postings -- possibly even extended in the way that Google's gmail affixes advertisements to e-mails according to their content.

Application of filters: There is necessarily a range of strategies through which to excuse any failure to respond to such opportunities. These include:

• refusing to be exposed to them ("turning off"), notably through selective use of "black lists"
• specializing, namely focusing one's interests to exclude unrelated topics
• affirming that those of which one is not aware, or to which one does not respond, are of inferior quality ("rubbish", "trivial", etc), namely some form of denial
• limiting attention to what trusted contacts recommend
• using prioritizing strategies to determine what others consider "most important" as a means of allocating appropriate attention time to them
• relying on insights previously received ("received ideas")
• declaring as suspect the sources to which one does not attend, possibly for ideological or religious reasons
• applying "white lists" to limit exposure only to selected sites that meet certain criteria

Implicit and explicit boundaries: Such procedures effectively establish a sense of relevance and irrelevance. Most elements of knowledge, and their associated information sources, necessarily become mutually irrelevant to varying degrees. What links to follow? Where? Why? and When? What is selected and relevant to whom? The consequences have been explored elsewhere (cf Dynamically Gated Conceptual Communities: emergent patterns of isolation within knowledge society, 2004). In effect everybody ends up cultivating their own "secret garden" -- a knowledge garden.

Ignorance and amnesia: Ironically every act of creativity in some part of society effectively renders the rest of society more ignorant -- until the new insight diffuses through knowledge space to them. Although ignorance is not a valid plea before the law, the proliferation of legislation is a form of collective creativity in governance that similarly increases ignorance in the population. Creativity, as exemplified by the development of a new web site, is therefore intimately related to the proliferation of ignorance. An associated phenomenon results from forgetting the value or location of certain knowledge -- exemplified by a web site -- or the loss of browser bookmarks. Whereas there is wide recognition of the tragedy of individual memory loss associated with alzheimer's disease, little is said about collective memory loss within a group or culture (cf Societal Learning and the Erosion of Collective Memory: a critique of the Club of Rome Report, 1980)

Questionable pressure to know "everything": This is illustrated by several phenomena:

• acquisition of general knowledge, as exemplified by the civil service examination in India (cf General Studies Manual, 2006)
• information consumerism (and "snacking"), possibly leading to a form of "information obesity"
• personal challenges to memory, as exemplified by memory competitions
• traditional and emerging security services strategies, as exemplified by the US Total Information Awareness programme and the highly secretive international Echelon surveillance system [more]

Such trends are to be contrasted with efforts to minimize the amount of information necessary to make a governance decision in a complex society

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