Information overload goes back at least to Ecclesiastes—“of making many books there is no end.” And according to historian Ann Blair, European scholars in the 1500s complained about the “confusing and harmful abundance of books.” By the late 17th century, a French observer speculated that the rapid multiplication of books would bring the world to a state “as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.” Apparently, the anxiety about the flow of information is constant, and no index at all of how much information surrounds us in any particular era.
So how much information does surround us? Authors W. Russell Neuman, Yong Jin Park, and Elliot Panek tried to find out by extending a pioneering effort of MIT media scholar Ithiel de Sola Pool (1917-1984) to measure information overload. Their results appear in the International Journal of Communication.
Pool, in the early 1980s, counted the number of words flowing into homes via many kinds of media—newspapers, TV, radio, records, telephone, direct mail, fax, and telegram—from 1960 through 1977. He measured their volume in units of quadrillions of words per medium per year nationally. To construct a more intuitively understandable measure, Neuman and his colleagues re-crunched Pool’s data and added their own through 2005, providing a measure of minutes of media content entering a household per day. To convert a count of printed words into a unit of time, they divided the number of words coming into the household in print by 240, the number of words the average adult reads in a minute. They developed estimates of average words-per-minute in various media, including television, radio, telephone, and the Internet.
They found that in 1960 there were 82 minutes of media coming into the home each day for every minute someone in the household actually consumed media. In 2005, that number had grown to 884 incoming minutes for each minute of consuming. Our information overload is nearly 11 times greater than it was 45 years ago. Shocked? No, probably not, but perhaps comforted that there is a plausible number to attach to your sense of the avalanche.
As the gap between media supply and demand widens, we consume an ever-smaller sliver of all the information available. One result is that we are becoming more reliant on digital intermediaries like search engines and social media to help us sort through it all. How much power do the likes of Google and Facebook exert over our media consumption? The authors suggest that their power is only beginning to come under “appropriate scrutiny.”
Neuman and his colleagues believe that while supply had already dwarfed demand in 1960, consumers were able to manage their media choices well enough: “It was relatively easy to find the country music station, the public broadcasting station, and the rock station on the radio dial.” What looked daunting to Pool in the early 1980s looked to Neuman, et. al., in retrospect, to be a cakewalk. But by 2005, the number of choices had become frustratingly unwieldy. As a result of such abundance, they argue, the consumption of information has shifted from “ ‘push’ to ‘pull’ media dynamics.” That is, we no longer wait for the morning paper or the nightly news broadcast to push information upon us—we can now pull in information whenever and wherever we want.
But most of us need help deciding which information to take in and which to ignore. Blair’s scholars of the 1500s needed help, too, and they invented their own shortcuts. They developed new ways of reading, like skimming; they wrote books with indexes, chapters, and other divisions that made them more digestible; and they developed compilations—sometimes by literally cutting and pasting. No doubt, we invent shortcuts on our own, too, but we also rely more and more on Google, Facebook, and other tools to manage the information flow. The tools we use also affect which media we consume. Neuman and his co-authors urge that we need to know more about how these tools “exercise their powers of control in directing attention, cuing fashions in popular culture, and influencing public opinion and commonly held information.”
A teacher would be fired if her lectures were as unpredictable as the events the news media must investigate. But no one in the jounralism profession is interested in communicating like a teacher by providing an annual one week review of events and conditions. So called experts like Michael Schudson are happy to write essays about information overload but they don't want to implement the only solution to the problem. MICHAEL ET AL ARE OBSESSED WITH THE HEROIC ROLE OF THE REPORTER. He and his colleagues, including those who work at CJR, have ignored my letters and emails for more than twenty years because journalists care more about themselves than other people. Consider the foster care programs in every state. A small but significant number of children are killed every year by the adults who were hired to protect them. And when this happens in a perveted manner, or to a photogenic child, there is a very public investigation by politicians and reporters. They almost always discover that there were too many children per social worker for adequate supervision and too much turnover in social workers and foster care parents to provide for well trained and competent employees. After these investigations some reforms are enacted and everyone says this will never happen again. But it always happens again beause children are a very weak special interest groups and the same politicans who enacted reforms gradually take money and resources away from the foster care program and give it to more powerful special interest groups. This in an incurable problem because politicians are controlled by incentives that they can not change. And one man, one vote is a wonderful moral principle and a lousy incentive to become an informed voter. So a scandal in a foster care program is eventually forgotten and ignored by politicians and voters. The problem is incurable because the news media won't provide an annual one week review of events and conditions. This simple format could include fundamental metrics for every government program because the government already collects the information and could be coereced into giving it to the news media in an easy to use format. Then voters could use the metrics and other information like the report cards that teacher use for rewarding and punishing their students. These news media report cards would be more effective than the heroic journalism that is the wet dream of Michael Schudson et al. Because they are published every year at the same time they create benchmarks that voters will apply to their poiticians. If the ratio of children to social workers is too high year after year, then voters will get madder and madder until something is done. And politicians will study the report cards more closely than voters because they don't want to have a scandal happen and voters to judge them of being guility of having ignored the warning signs. But politicians can ignore the warning signs and survive a scandal, see Governor Jeb Bush and Rilya Wilson, because voters are not judgmental enough. But reporters will never publish an annual one week review of events and conditions for two reasons., A photogenic child is more profitable when it bleeds and leads on a newspaper's front page. And a reporter can win a journalism award for a long investigation into a corrupt and incompetent government program. He can't win an award for doing boring reporing by publishiing an annual report card. Maybe it's time to invent a news journalism award.
#1 Posted by Stanley Krauter, CJR on Tue 2 Oct 2012 at 12:40 PM