In part 1 of this series we determined 5 potential elements that make up the Info Overload equation:

• The number of medium
• The number of connections
• The ease of generation of information in a given medium
• The speed of the channel through which a medium is delivered
• The ‘filters’ an individual has between the various mediums and themselves.

Now, let’s take a look at another scenario, this time we travel to the late 80′s.

In many businesses, local area networks have sprung up. Each individual has a computer. People are beginning to become familiar with email and the creation and saving of electronic documents on a network drive. Email gateways (i.e. the ability to send email outside of the organization) do not yet exist. I can create a document and save it at the click of a few menu items. Email is beginning to replace memos and in turn is starting to become more informal. I don’t yet suffer from information overload but I am beginning to see signs of the challenges as email communication tends towards an informal communications tool.

So – what has happened to our 5 elements of Info Overlaod?

• Well, for a start, the number of mediums for the written word has expanded … we now have screens and electronic representation as well as books, newpapers, magazines and particularly fax’s (if you are in business … the late 80′s was the boom of the fax machine era)
• The number of potential connections has expanded exponentially. I can now connect to anybody else in my business directly … so the business I was in at the time had 200 staff, therefore 200 connections.
• The ease of generation of information has improved remarkedly. I can type an email or document at a keyboard, save, forward it to any of my connections or print it out and fax it to any business that has a fax machine.
• The speed of the electonnic channel is near instantaneous – the push of a button. At the same time the cycle from electronic form to print has reduced as laser printers come to the fore.
• Hmmm, now the filters … the barriers between me and information. It is not just a matter of me going and ‘pulling’ information anymore … emails can arrive from anyone I am connected to (i.e. they push it to me). I can have access to thousands of electronic documents stored on our network drives. In the early phases of these comopany networks there was some discpline – a hangover from the days of organizing paper files. But as the speed and ease of creating information changes, and it becomes a less formal envrionment … those disciplines of orgnizing information dissappear. Many don’t have the discplines or habits to filter out or ignore email … there is that need to RESPOND now … as soon as it pops into the In Box.

You can probably see where this is going. Compared to the scenario in part 1 we can see how there are significant changes in the number of mediums, the potential number of connections, the ease of creating information and speed of the channels through which it flows … and unfortunately no change in the ‘filters’ or ‘barriers’ between me and that information.

In part 3 we’ll skip forward another decade and see how the information overload explosion was begginning to overwhelm everyone.

You probably all have your own examples of Info Overload and also some ideas of the causes. I like to ground my analysis in real-life examples so let’s take a journey back through time to the late 1970’s and consider the following scenario:

I’m in my teens and have just discovered reading – I read anything I can get my hands on. This usually means books, newspapers and magazines. To access new reading material I need to go to the library, the local bookshop, or to friends. I live in a small country town, so the size of the library is small, my budget is limited and the bookshops don’t open in the weekends or after school. I don’t suffer from information overload – in fact I’m running out of reading material that interests me.

Now, what elements in the above scenario determined how much written information I had access to?

1. The number of mediums over which written information was transmitted – books, newspapers and magazines.

2. The number of ‘connections’ between me as a consumer of information and the locations where that information was available – the library, a few bookshops and a collection of friends.

But there are more elements here than just my ability to access information – there are also factors related to the supply of information. For example:

3. The ease with which one can generate information in a given medium. For the written word, there is a certain effort involved in the production of output – based on the technology of the time this cycle hadn’t changed much since the beginning of the 20^th century (typewriters, printing presses, manual editing, type-setting etc.).

4. The “speed” of the channel through which the medium was delivered e.g. new books come through the publishing cycle and might take months to come down the delivery chain to a local bookstore. For magazines the channel speed might be weeks. And for newspapers the cycle is daily.

There is one final element here that is critical:

5. The barriers or “filters” between me and the information. Here are two examples from the scenario: the library indexing system and the physicality of the medium, in other words the need to get myself to the local library (acts as a barrier between me and the information – I have to actively go and “pull” the information I want). You could also include here my “interests” as they also act as a filter of sorts.

These elements are perhaps the beginnings of an understanding into the factors that make up the information overload equation:

• The number of mediums (3)
• The number of connections (2)
• The ease of generation of information in a given medium (daily through to yearly)
• The speed of the channel through which a medium is delivered (overnight through to weeks)
• The ‘filters’ an individual has between the various mediums and themselves.

In part 2 of this series we’ll provide a typical modern scenario and redo the info overload analysis.