Information Overload Research Group

Tune-in on YouTube for a one hour Cambridge Thinklab with Professor Gloria Mark, Author of her new book Attention Span as she discusses “The Science of Our Attention Spans”.  Find focus and restore balance as our minds have undergone a fundamental shift in how they work in the digital age. Gloria Mark is Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD from Columbia University in psychology and studies the impact of digital media on people’s lives. She takes a deep dive in examining multitasking, interruptions, and mood with the use of digital devices. She has published over 200 articles, and in 2017 was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy which recognizes leaders in the field […]

Spanning the history of time, philosophers have mused over the impact of humanity’s consumption of information. We learned from Socrates that information can be uncertain, and as such all we really know is that we know nothing.  Plato lamented that “by telling them of many things (writing) without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.” The Oxford English dictionary tells us that the “Information Explosion” began in 1941.  As technology advances, digital data continues to expand at an exponential rate. In 2022 alone, humankind produced 74 zettabytes of […]

Our minds have undergone a fundamental shift in how they work in the digital age. Gloria Mark’s new book Attention Span helps the reader find focus and restore balance. Attention Span covers two decades of research on attention, multitasking, interruptions, email, and more. The book presents an optimistic vision of how we can use our technologies in the current age and still achieve positive wellbeing. The book discusses popular myths about our attention and refutes them based on research. The book is divided into three parts: The first part covers the science of attention. It takes a deep dive into mechanisms that underlie attention, and how they are affected when we use our devices, like when we multitask or are […]

Date: 7/5/2021
Category: Blog Post
Tags: Information Overload
Source Author: IvyPanda
Source Date: 5/21/2021
Source Name: IvyPanda blog
Source URL: Link to Source Article or Site

A detailed guide to to causes, manifestations and solutions to Information Overload.

Date: 6/7/2021
Category: Website
Tags:
Source Author:
Source Date:
Source Name: Are.na
Source URL: Link to Source Article or Site

A collection of quotations, graphics, and links exploring the effects of information overload and other “pathologies of information”.

Date: 9/30/2020
Category: Journal Article
Tags: Email overload
Source Author: Teri Saylor
Source Date: 9/12/2020
Source Name: Association of International Certified Professional Accountants
Source URL: Link to Source Article or Site

After spending the last few days managing a massive volume of email, I decided to look online for some practical tips that can be practiced to be more efficient and effective in preventing email overload.

This article published in the AICPA online news provides several practical tips such as:

• Adopt an email folder system to organize your emails
• Use filters to automatically file or better yet delete unwanted emails
• Don’t use emails for conversation, try good old telephone or in person conversations
• Don’t allow emails to interrupt workflow or other planned activities
• Avoid “reply to all” when really not required
• Don’t skim and skip to come back later, handle once
• Think before you send, is the email important? would you want to receive it?
• Read the full article and helpful insights when dealing with a deluge of email