THE CONSEQUENCES
Missing
Productivity Increases
Increased
Health Problems and Job Dissatisfaction
THE
SOLUTION (or at least parts of it)
Attitude Adjustments
Evaluate E-Mail Practices
Revise Research Activities
Organize
Ongoing Information Retrieval
THE FUTURE
-- An Optimistic View
Benefits
of Managing Information Gluts
Unexpected
Costs of Better Information Management
The problem is discussed in daily newspapers, magazines, talk shows, on the radio and the net. It is variously referred to as information glut, information overload, information smog, infobog, etc. It is the problem only experienced by those lucky enough to have jobs, technology, and communication access. These "lucky" people may feel fortunate when reflecting that half the world's population has never attempted a telephone call. But they feel decidedly unlucky when contemplating the daily barrage of information that threatens to overwhelm them. Every day the info-rich receive "information" from newspapers, television, telephone calls, faxes, e-mail, and the Internet. Amidst all the noise, the info-rich are aware that important and valuable information is being conveyed. But how do they separate the redundant, uninteresting and outdated from the up-to-date, pertinent, and vital.
Increase in Number of Communications Receptacles
The constant introduction of communication systems adds to the information glut. New technology does not displace the old; it is layered over existing systems thereby substantially increasing the message load. The advent of e-mail, pagers, cellular phones, video conferencing, chat rooms, and discussion groups did not replace snail mail, telephones, answering machines, faxes, and voice mail. Instead they were added as another layer of communication. For perspective, as early as July 1994, Americans already possessed "148.6 million e-mail addresses, cellular phones, pagers, fax machines, voice mailboxes, and answering machines -- up 365% from 40.7 million in 1987." [1] The most remarkable aspect of this figure is that it was probably only 24.8 million people who acquired new equipment.
Increase in Number of Communications
Steven Ginsberg quoting a recent study "found that workers send and receive an average of 178 messages each day through such vehicles as voicemail, e-mail, faxes, and pagers. The most frequent tools were telephone (24 messages a day), e-mail (14 a day) and voicemail (11 a day). Eighty-four percent of respondents said their work is interrupted by messages at least three times an hour." [2] In addition to the increase in business and personal communication, many of the new communication systems lend themselves to commercial exploitation. For example, spamming on e-mail has greatly increased the load on bandwidth and attention-span.
Increase in the Amount of Information Available
The increase in the amount of information on the World Wide Web has been increasing at an exponential rate. A driving force in this rapid growth is the ability of anyone with access to a Web server to publish.
Inability to determine quality amidst the quantity of information
First, we need to discuss if this is really information that is bombarding
everyone. Data does not equal information. One of the definitions of "information"
is that it is new. The redundancy of the information that inundates the
info-rich is astronomical. It is only information, in this sense, the first
time they see it. The rest is, at best, data; at worst, "noise." Furthermore,
the information often arrives with no authentication as to source, validity
of data, etc. "The mere fact that a resource is available on the Internet
does not provide any guarantee of importance, accuracy, utility or value."
[3] And lastly, it comes undigested and
as a hodgepodge. "I draw a distinction between the terms of data and information:
data is raw, unfiltered, and generally not so useful to our small human
brains. We need data to be converted to information before we can really
use it. That happens by adding structure." [4]
Missing Productivity Increases
When network technologies were first introduced, they were expected to bring significant improvements in worker productivity. These productivity gains, however, have yet to materialize. Empirical analysis of the data thus far has failed to establish a significantly positive relationship between information technologies and productivity growth. What's more, some people have even started to wonder whether the introduction of computers and other information technology has actually had a negative effect on productivity levels: "Companies up and down the land report that they waste a huge amount of time and resources generating, distributing, processing and storing paperwork that adds no value to the business and deflects people's attention away from productive work." [5]
While the productivity paradox can be explained in a number of ways, components of the information glut may be contributing factors. Network technologies (including the World Wide Web and e-mail) were expected to provide decisionmakers with easy access to more of the information they need to make better decisions faster. Certainly a wealth of valuable information has been made available. The remaining difficulty has been in learning to manage that flood of information. It's like trying to drink from a firehose. Given current technological and human constraints, decisionmakers are not able to process all of the information that passes by them. Some managers complain that key items are getting misplaced in the growing piles of information that they are expected to review.
Contributing to the problem has been a reduction in the number of knowledge workers (e.g., secretaries, company librarians) that used to sift through information gluts to separate nonessential and redundant items from the valuable information that should be brought to a manager's attention. Many companies downsized on the assumption that computers could effectively replace people. Information technologies, however, are best implemented as complements; they cannot substitute for human skills in processing complex information flows.
Increased Health Problems and Job Dissatisfaction
There is a growing concern that information gluts may be contributing
to employee health problems and increased job dissatisfaction. To determine
the extent of the problem, Reuters Business Information conducted a survey
of 1,300 managers. They published startling results in an October 1996
report. "One in four [managers] admitted to suffering ill health as a result
of the amount of information they are having to handle." Moreover, "two-thirds
of managers [said] stress from information overload increases tension with
colleagues and lowers job satisfaction."[6]
These figures illustrate that information gluts have become a serious problem,
impacting workers in perhaps unexpected ways. Companies and individuals
would be well-advised to start making a conscious effort to find effective
ways to deal with information overload.
THE SOLUTION (or at least parts of it)
Add Another Head or Simplify Your Life?
In an age when technology has contributed so much to societal progress, organizational effectiveness, and the management of day-to-day life for millions of individuals, it seems logical that technology would offer some of the best answers to a problem like information overload. Too much information? The answer must lie in more advanced search engines, more sophisticated filters, or more creative ploys on the Web to draw attention to the best informational resources.
Some researchers are even suggesting that genetic engineering will offer future generations an opportunity to overcome the basic human limitation of having only one head with which to process information.[7] If we only have one set of eyes with which to read information and only one brain with which to think, then why not simply modify human anatomy by adding one (or two or three) more additional heads? Granted, additional head(s) might introduce a new set of problems--how, for example, would heads negotiate eating, talking, or kissing?--but maybe life in the information-overloaded age justifies radical measures. We could turn to science fiction for other ideas. Studying for final exams might not be such a grueling experience if we were aided by one or more computer chips embedded in our brains, speeding up our ability to process, organize, and retrieve information.
Though technological advances will continue to offer exciting solutions to information overload, perhaps the most novel approach is to adjust our expectations on how much information we need. Dr. David Lewis, a psychologist who assisted the 1996 investigation by Reuters Business Information on the effects of information overload, notes that the solution to information overload lies as much in changing attitudes as in improved technology. "It requires managers to get away from the idea that a high quantity of hours put in equals a high quality of work," he stated. "For knowledge workers, that is just not true."[8] On that principle, some organizations are choosing the route to simplification. For example, a group of Xerox software developers in Webster, New York, is experimenting with "quiet times," which allow employees to work without interruption from either inside or outside the company.[9] Professionals whose jobs revolve around information are beginning to learn that more information is not necessarily better. A capital management specialist who tracks the performance of more than 5,000 companies for her firm's investors confesses that "the key to staying happy with myself is expectation management. Internalizing the fact that I can't know everything about every company may be the most difficult part of my job."[10] In the end, the most important requirements in making a good decision do not necessarily lie in gathering large quantities of information, but rather taking time to absorb and process information, reflect and analyze, and discuss the issue at hand with others.[11]
Base Your Business Model on the Economics of Attention
In business models based on the economics of information, content providers focus on selling information directly to consumers. In some instances, however, information is not the scarce resource -- attention is. Businesses must compete for people's time. Some successful business models of the future will be based on the economics of attention, which means focusing on bringing quality information to people in a meaningful context.
Information production will still be motivated by profit incentives. Competition amongst substitutable information sources, however, will drive down prices for the information content itself. Instead of expecting direct payment for creating information, content providers are advised to "manage their business as i f it were free, and then figure out how to set up relationships or develop ancillary products and services that cover the costs of developing content."[12] Consumers are already overwhelmed by the glut of information that is available on the Internet. While valuable content exists, consumers often do not have the time to look for a "needle in the haystack." In order to access content that suits their individual interests, consumers will be interested in purchasing filtering services, hiring search experts, subscribing to rating services, etc. In addition, consumers that value the free content presented by certain authors or performers will be willing to pay to extend that relationship, e.g., by purchasing additional consulting services, or by paying to attend a live performance. Thus, even if content is free, there will still be ample opportunity for content providers to profit by selling expertise.
Content providers may also make money by adapting the broadcast model, (another business model based on the economics of attention), to the digital world. Broadcast media, i.e., television and radio stations, make money by providing free content that will attract mass audiences, and sell the consumers' attention to advertisers. As John Perry Barlow points out: "[T]he issue of consumer payment for broadcast products [is] irrelevant. The consumers themselves [are] the product. Broadcast media [are] supported by the sale of the attention of their audience to advertisers.…"[13] Advertising has already started to appear on the World Wide Web, and is considered a critical funding source by many companies.
[For related information, check out Group F's paper The Future of Business on the WWW ]
E-mail applications provide users with an exciting and effective alternative form of communication. This network technology, however, has fallen prey to the information glut. International Data Corp. predicted that by 1995 there would already be 64 million e-mail users.[14] As the number of e-mail messages has skyrocketed, it has become increasingly difficult for users to manage their e-mail communications. Unsolicited commercial e-mail -- known as "spam" in geekspeak -- has further aggravated the problem.
Looking at more traditional forms of communication, we see that these sorts of problems are nothing new. Indeed, complaints about the overwhelming number of telephone calls, faxes, pieces of mail received, etc. can still be heard. Moreover, unsolicited telephone calls, junk faxes, and junk mail are a headache for many consumers. Over the years, however, people have learned how to better manage these information flows (e.g., by developing filing systems for snail mail and faxes), and society has developed methods for minimizing the amount of unsolicited advertising (e.g., unlisted telephone numbers, laws against junk faxes). Solutions are in the process of being developed to help e-mail users.
Filtering
One advantage that e-mail has over other forms of communication is the ability to use technology to manage the incoming information. Some e-mail programs allow users to create a filing system for storing their messages in a more useful fashion. For example, Netscape Communicator enables users to create files within their Inbox. When sifting through your mail, you can easily store messages in the appropriate file for later reference.
Some e-mail applications have even incorporated filters that enable users to presort incoming messages. In Netscape Communicator, for example, users may stipulate that messages satisfying certain criteria be moved to a designated folder, e.g., a message that contains IS206 in the body can automatically be placed in the IS206 subfolder of the Inbox. To notify the user that unread messages have been stored in the IS206 subfolder, Netscape Communicator lists the IS206 subfolder in bold. Recent research by IDC revealed that employees at the Bose
| company using Outlook 97 (a similar
e-mail filtering system
from Microsoft) were able to increase their productivity in managing e-mail by 20 percent.[15] |
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regulate the flow of
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E-mail users are not the only ones using technology to combat spam. The volume of spam has become so large that it is slowing down the machines of Internet service providers (ISPs). This is not good for business, and has prompted ISPs to start experimenting with technical solutions.
The most common spam attacks are blocked by disabling a mail server's relaying ability. E-mail messages are dropped if they are not intended for or have not originated from a user with an account on a particular server. This makes it more difficult for spammers to misuse ISP servers for retransmission.
Some ISPs are implementing more complicated schemes. They are "blacklisting" specific servers and Internet domains (i.e., spheres of influences shared by many servers) that are reputed sources of spam. Messages from these blacklisted sources are not accepted. The ISPs are required to maintain constant vigilance in order to keep the blacklist up-to-date.
There are downsides, of course, to implementing some of these technical solutions. In particular, user filters and ISP blacklisting may prevent legitimate e-mail messages from making it through. Of the two, user filters are often considered the lesser evil since they give users the ultimate authority in specifying filtering criteria. Some ISP customers complain that ISP filtering is a violation of their privacy.
In addition, neither user filters nor ISP blacklisting can guarantee that unwanted messages will be preempted. It is still possible for disguised messages to sneak through. While filtering technologies will continue to improve, it is unlikely they will ever be perfect. E-mail users and ISPs will continue to have to weigh the potential costs against the potential benefits in deciding whether or not to implement technical solutions.
Organizational Innovations
Some companies are developing policies to help employees manage e-mail gluts. For example, one company has set restrictions on when users can access e-mail. Employees at Computer Associates in Islandia, New York, can only read and send e-mail before 9:30 am, at lunch, and after 4 pm.[16] The success of such programs, however, remains unclear.
An innovative solution for companies may be to create a searchable Web page on an intranet where employees can publish information that is of interest to multiple users. Currently, employees often store hundreds of e-mail messages, just in case the information will be useful at some unknown point in the future. Instead, information could be posted on an intranet Web page. While employees should continue to send some pieces of information through e-mail, other items would be better relayed using an intranet system.
There are at least three advantages to adding an intranet system. First, this would cut down on the number of e-mail messages being sent and then employees would not have to spend as much time managing their e-mail. Mike Elgan, of WINDOWS Magazine, anticipates that such a system could reduce his e-mail load from 130 messages per day to a mere 30.[17] Second, the intranet could actually increase employee access to information. Often employees store e-mail messages that are not of immediate use, but that seem like they could be important in the future. When they finally have a use for the information, they must sift through many messages to find the one of interest. Even when e-mail messages are neatly filed, this can be a time-consuming (and sometimes unsuccessful) process. Employees would find it much easier searching information posted to an intranet site. A third advantage of the intranet is that it would be easier to access timely information. As employees add items to the intranet page, they will be replacing any out-of-date information.
Legal Efforts
Legal efforts have been focused on combatting spam.
Some ISPs are pursuing litigation. Most notably, America Online (AOL) is going after several well-known spammers.[18] Since it will probably take years for these cases to work their way through the courts, ISPs likely view this as a show of force rather than a real solution. Nonetheless, the message is clear: ISPs are serious about curbing spam.
Some Congressmen are proposing legislation. On May 21, 1997, Senator Murkowski of Alaska introduced S. 771, the Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail Choice Act of 1997. The bill requires that
| unsolicited commercial e-mail be labeled as such in the subject line. This could help improve filtering efforts. Meanwhile, Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey has introduced a bill in the House that would place an outright ban on spam by extending an existing law that bans junk-faxes. The nature of the Internet, however, would make it extremely difficult to enforce either piece of legislation. |
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The Limitations of Search Engines
Many people hope that more sophisticated search engines will solve information overload. But as Hal Berghel of the Association for Computing Machinery points out, there is a fundamental inadequacy of search engines: search engines detect the full range of documents on the Web, unable to distinguish between an advertisement or an experimental document not intended for public viewing.[19] Therefore, no matter how finely tuned, search engines will continue to reflect the "multimedia mediocrity" that exists on the Web. Search engines will become more efficient only when meta-tags embedded in HTML coding help to identify the contents of web pages. Although meta-tags such as "no index" and "commercial advertising" won't solve the problem of irrelevant documents retrieved during searches, they will at least help remove a lot of the litter.
While not providing base underlying technology for filtering, metadata standards can provide some of the underlying infrastructure that filtering technologies can use in order to do their work. Two promising sources of metadata that are being developed are the Dublin Core and RDF, the Resource Description Framework being developed by the Wordwide Web Consortium. The Dublin Core metadata effort started out as an initiative of OCLC and has developed through a series of workshops that have had international participation from several communities including libraries, networking and digital library research communities, and content specialists. Dublin Core defines a set of 15 metadata elements that are intended to facilitate description and discovery of internet resources.
RDF is a project of the Worldwide Web Consortium. It grew out of the work done with PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection), an infastructure for associating metadata with Internet content. PICS was originally developed to help control what children access on the Internet, but is also a more general facility on top of which different kinds of labeling and rating systems can be built. RDF is intended to provide an infrastructure to support metadata access across many web-based activities, including satellite maps, content ratings, search engine data collection, digital library collections, and distributed authoring. RDF is intended to allow different communities to define the metadata that meets the needs of their community and applications, and to provide a uniform and interoperable mechanism for exchanging metadata among programs and across the Web. It will use XML as its transfer syntax and will include both human-readable and machine-parsable definitions.
The Power of the Brain
Still, it seems, nothing can compete with the power of the human brain, and the ability of a human expert to scan, browse, and absorb data in any particular field of interest, analyze that information, and then point you to the original source if you wish to obtain more information. These experts include newsletter editors, columnists, librarians, and information specialists who will continue to play a valuable role in providing the public with highly processed meta-sources.[20] A good example of two such skilled experts are John Gehl and Suzanne Douglas, who write Edupage, which provides a three-times-weekly summary of news about information technology, a service of Educom, a Washington, D.C.-based consortium of leading colleges and universities who aim to transform education through the use of information technology. As part of its efforts to manage online learning resources Educom has also developed the Instructional Management Systems (IMS) Project that uses metadata to provide an efficient means to describe and search for learning resources on the Internet. Again, all of these efforts are attempts to control information overload.
Organize Ongoing Information Retrieval
As Matthew Butterick pointed out in his distinction between data and information, one of the key elements of information is structure. The example Mr. Butterick provides is of a phone book. He asks you to contemplate the phone company deciding to publish everyone's names and numbers in random order. All the data you need would be available to you but it would be completely useless. "The real service that the phone company provides with the phone book is taking the data and giving it logical structure (alphabetical order), visual structure (a multi-column format) and physical structure (a bound volume). The value is not in the data per se, it's in adding structure and thus converting data into information." [21] Most solutions to the information glut require some infusion of structure.
Technological Solutions
In response to the expansion of available information, technologies that "push" information are gaining popularity because they act like intelligent secretaries--gathering, filtering, and organizing information so that it can be used easily and effectively. Likewise, news services that customize content are proliferating. These attempts to predigest or selectively gather information take several forms. Some examples are intelligent agents, artificial intelligence systems, automatic filtering agents, personalized broadcast networks, on-line news, and metadata standards.
Knobots are mobile agents intended for use in distributed systems. They are autonomous, able to continue operations even when disconnected from their source, and able to migrate closer to data or other programs in order to conserve network bandwidth. For example, in searching an image database over the network, instead of loading each image and then performing some computation on it, the knobot would move to the source of the image database, do the search there, and return with the results.
The Harvest system is an integrated set of tools to gather, extract, organize, search, cache, and replicate relevant information across the Internet. Harvest supports the construction of different types of indexes that can be customized to the peculiarities of different sorts of information collections. It has mechanisms for caching and replication to avoid network bottlenecks.
Grand Central Station is a combination search engine, push tool and filter that can be used to collect information fitting predefined profiles and delivering it to the end user. GCS dispatches crawlers over the network seeking information that matches the metadata established in the profiles. Upon delivery, the information passes through a series of filters with the core data extracted and delivered to the end-user.
Human Solutions
One of the most ignored solutions to reducing information overload is
human intervention, either as an organization or as individuals. In struggling
to use technology to control technologically-spawned infoglut, many lose
sight of the fact that the truly intelligent agent is a person. Many organizations
are responding by creating policies that reintroduce human agents. For
example, some companies are resurrecting what used to be called secretaries.
Now they call them "mission control" and they limit them to top executives.
Mission control sifts through an executive's messages deleting extraneous
or out-of-date messages, compiling messages pertaining to single topics
and converting material from one medium to another.
THE FUTURE -- AN OPTIMISTIC VIEW
Benefits of Managing Information Gluts
One of the primary benefits has to be the commensurate development of ways to communicate information. The possession of a pager, cellular phone, fax machine, and PC can bring too much information. But they can also make our lives safer, more comfortable, and more interconnected.
For example, much work has been done to allow travelers access to weather and traffic information."PC-TV can use a set-top option that provides traffic and other local information on a new channel that is broadcast on a viewer's existing TV, rather than via the Internet. The advantage of such a service is the delivery of customized content that is both manageable in terms of amount, and useful because it is tailored to a specific market. Multimedia applications are receiving a similar boost from the possible convergence of satellite providers and radio and cable broadcasters; for example, the development of an automobile sun visor on which is a map of a city and its suburbs. The sun visor is linked to the antenna of the car that receives radio signals that illuminate areas of the map in which there is heavy traffic, allowing motorists to travel more quickly and safely." [23]
Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellites are opening a wealth of possibilities, from automated utility meter reading to global positioning and tracking systems small enough for hikers to wear and use as personal safety devices if they become lost or encounter trouble.
Since technology is neutral, much of how it is used can be politically motivated. With the increasing amount of information there is a corresponding increasing desire on manufacturers' parts to ensure that we have multiple methods of access. This could lead to increased access. For example, "the application of these technologies could extend the ability to communicate on a global basis to developing countries as well. For example, solar-powered phone booths are now being deployed in remote areas that are underserved by existing telecommunications infrastructures…another intriguing variant is solar-powered cellular pre-paid phone card or credit card phone for use in rapidly growing nations; these devices require no wiring because they depend on solar panels for power and can be moved where needed." [24]
Wireless and satellite technologies, in particular, provide the opportunity to establish an instant communications network without incurring all of the costs and time required to develop a capital-intensive telecommunications infrastructure.
Unexpected "Costs" of Better Information Management
Information is a good thing. The extraordinary benefits of learning how to manage information resources clearly outweigh the costs. Still, it is important to contemplate some of the social consequences of designing systems that filter out information, gearing information to the needs and desires of individuals rather than communities of individuals.
First, we need to recognize that the very purpose of filters is to provide biased information--based on either an individual's specifications, or based on a community's defined need(s). This kind of filter has been in place for a long time already in common resources like books, newspapers, radio talk shows, magazines, and other types of publications. Filters both allow people to "tune in" or "tune out" depending on their perspective. If, for example, you're interested in left politics, you're more likely to tune in to a radio station like Berkeley's KPFA and more likely to tune out Rush Limbaugh's radio talk show (unless you're engaged in some kind of research or monitoring project specifically aimed at "collecting information").
Although there is nothing inherently wrong with biased filters, they can pose potentially dangerous social consequences by isolating individuals from different viewpoints and thus contributing to the loss of a common social dialogue. As we design systems meant to control information overload, it is important to recognize the potential social consequences to controlling the flow of information. After all, exposure to diverse information--information that you have not yet had the opportunity to form an opinion on--assures a population that is simultaneously diverse and aware of the population's diversity. How are you to know whether you like punk rock unless you have the opportunity to become exposed to it? And even if you don't like punk rock, exposure to it may give you insight into punk rock culture, allowing you to--hopefully--keep an open mind about punk rockers.
With all of their faults, newspapers and news agencies provide a common context of understanding among people by promoting debate--and providing an opportunity for societal change. When Anita Hill challenged Clarence Thomas during the Supreme Court hearings, the whole nation sat glued to the radio or television. Everyone debated whether they believed Anita Hill or Clarence Hill. It became a great catalyst for a deeper, societal dialogue and understanding of sexual harassment and other related issues. If we move away from a model that provides a common source of news, then we may lose a key mechanism for drawing people together in dialogue and debate. With the greater capability of filtering the news and information we are exposed to, we may hardly have a need to venture outside our office or home to buy groceries or the daily news, much less be exposed to something new or unexpected. We face the possibility of becoming a much more fragmented society, where people are unwilling to engage in finding solutions for societal problems that they don't face as individuals, such as poverty or illiteracy.
In a democratic society, it is important to promote a diversity of opinions and a social dialogue between different sectors of society. After all, if anyone wants to convince others of their view they must have some understanding of their opposition's viewpoint. And, to maintain a democratic society, political leaders must have the capacity to promote a common ground among their constituencies.
Another cause for concern is that we might eliminate the chance of making serendipitous discoveries when we use finely-tuned information filtering systems. Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab and a proponenet of customized news, agrees that filtering software should be designed with a serendipity dial that can be turned up or down, depending on how much random information you want to receive with your customized news.[25]
We must continue to remind ourselves that we shouldn't always turn to
technological solutions when solving problems like information overload.
John Seely Brown, director of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
acknowledges that "Filters are going to play some role, but we as technologists,
in looking for the techie solution, have maybe overlooked simpler, more
powerful ideas. Twenty minutes over a cup of coffee can help you zero in
on something as filters may not."[26]
Endnotes
1Tetzeli, Rick. "Surviving Information
Overload," Fortune,July 11, 1994, p. 60.
2Ginsberg, Steven. "So Many Messages,
So Little Time," The Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1997.
3Berghel, Hal. "Cyberspace 2000:
Dealing with Information Overload; The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions,
Our Plans," Communications of the ACM, February 1997, p. 19.
4Butterick, Matthew. "On interactivity,
information and digital design," lecture given at Netscape Developers Conference,
March, 1996.
5 Treacy, Declan. "Out with the
In-tray," Director, January 1997, pp. 40-43.
6 "Do Filters Really Solve Information
Overload?" The Information Advisor, Vol. 9, No. 2, February 1997.
7 Xerox PARC researcher Rich Gold
presented this bold idea at a SIMposium talk this fall. See "Several
Thoughts on Several Heads" (Draft 1.1), Xerox PARC, http://www.parc.xerox.com/cdi/members/richgold/heads/peru5.html
8 Black, George. "Not surfing but
drowning," Financial Times (London), January 8, 1997, p. 3.
9 Tetzeli, Rick. "Surviving Information
Overload," Fortune, July 11, 1994, p. 60.
10 Ibid.
11 "Do Filters Really Solve Information
Overload?" The Information Advisor, Vol. 9, No. 2, February 1997.
12 Dyson, Esther. "Intellectual
Value," Wired, July 1995, pp. 138-139.
13 Barlow, John Perry. "The Economy
of Ideas," Wired, March 1994, p. 86.
14 "Intelligent Interfaces:
The Future; Electronic Mail Systems," ViewText, p. 5.
15 Wheelwright, Geoffrey. "Information
Overload: Now They Call It the Infoglut," Information Technology,
p. 9.
16 Tetzeli, Rick. "Surviving Information
Overload," Fortune, July 11, 1994, p. 60.
17 Elgan, Mike. "Love the Web?
Now You Can Build Your Own -- Here's Why Your Company Should Have Its Very
Own Intranet," WINDOWS Magazine, June 1, 1996, p. 47.
18 "The Internet: Spam, spam, spam,
spam," The Economist, November 1, 1997, p. 85.
19 Berghel, Hal. "Cyberspace 2000:
Dealing with Information Overload; The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions,
Our Plans," Communications of the ACM, February 1997, p. 19.
20 Ibid.
21 Butterick, Matthew. "On interactivity,
information and digital design," lecture given at Netscape Developers Conference,
March, 1996.
22 Houlder, Vanessa. "Intelligent
Reading," The Financial Times, London edition, June 11, 1997.
23 Weaver, Paul. "Telecommunications
for the new millennium," Newsweek, October 6, 1997.
24 Ibid.
25 Tetzeli, Rick. "Surviving Information
Overload," Fortune, July 11, 1994.
26 Ibid.
Additional Sources
Currid, Cheryl. "Is It Treasure or Trash? Innovative Services Are Available to Help You Sift Through Internet Data to Find the Information You Need," Information Week, December 9, 1996, p. 124.
Eager, Angela. "Adrift on a Sea of Data: Information Overload," PC User, July 10, 1996, p. 17.
"Instant Library," M2 Presswire, September 26, 1997.
Pearce, C. Glenn and Randall Sleeth. "Communication Barriers Appear as Technology," Information Executive, Vol. 3, No. 2, March 22, 1990, p. 20.
Rosen, Sheri. "Making Sense and Cents from Information Overload," Communication World, Vol. 9, No. 4, March 1992, p. 36.
Stillwell, Dennis. "Under Siege: Remedies Available for Those Suffering Information Overload," Tulsa World, November 9, 1996, p. E6.