Information overload is plague of modern society

Since I started writing this sentence hundreds of terabytes of data were uploaded onto social networks, or at least two articles were published online. And it’s only from major outlets.

Evolution

Welcome to knowledge society folks, where information is our most valuable commodity. Access to information is more affordable than ever, a number of data skyrockets every day. According to Daniel Levitin, McGill University psychology professor, we’ve created more information in the last 10 years than in all of human history before that. Of course, this is a consequence of internet spread, smartphones, social media… and here a big issue arises. Our brains are simply not designed to handle it.

In evolution, it takes millions of years to create such efficient brains as humans have today and anthropologists say that in the past 100 000 years it didn’t improve so much. It means that our brain has nearly the same limits to adequately absorb information as our stone-age ancestors used to have. As we still continue to live in a knowledge-obsessed wonderland the information overload and all the consequences that follow are inevitable.

Story

Like many of you, I’m a millennial who grew up during the dawn of the information age driven by computers and the internet.

I have been working in the digital marketing field since I’ve finished my studies five years ago. As a marketer, I follow trends about how people consume content, what is the best channel to deliver information, how information flow affects people's behavior. And there is one clear pattern that bothers me and the digital marketers community: as people get more information they get less engaged to it. I was always very curious to find out what is the cause and how to tackle it.

Almost a year ago I met two brilliant programmers Tadas and Ernest. These guys had lots of experience and have recently finished master's studies in Artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. Both moved to Vilnius to start working on a project they called “the smartest content aggregator”. By the time I met them, the project had already received a small investment from a local startup incubator. So we had a lot of discussions about how to solve some pain points of information delivery. I joined a team with great excitement.

Modern disease

As a team, we have tried to build a vision of what we do and clarify the problem which we are trying to solve. Seems like usual startup stuff to do, but it isn’t so easy how it looks. So we thought about many possible cases of how our technology can help society. From just helping people find relevant news, reducing “web noise”, till saving journalism by focusing on how to help people find high-quality content among click bites model-driven news or even worse fake news (it’s a very interesting topic but without departing from the current subject I will discuss our experience about it in a future article). After all, it was still unclear which path to choose. Then it was time to take a look at the bigger picture and measure it with some numbers.

So, I dig and find these interesting infographics:

Just take a break here and think. Average American spends 1/3 his time consuming any type of content with information in it! People took in almost six times as much information every day now as they did in 1986.

Here we have a bigger picture and it clearly shows how our technology-driven society keeps information floodgates open, content rushes at us in countless formats, and creates a flood called information overload.

Consequences

Let’s step back to the beginning. Every day such a huge wave of information keeps exhausting our brains by pushing them to the edge of their evolution-created capabilities. Some of you would say so what..? it’s just a small sacrifice to achieve the benefits of a modern knowledge economy. But let’s see some facts and then decide how small sacrifice is.

By some reports around 20% of adults in western countries feel information overload and say it affects them negatively. According to a recent study by Dr. Kazi Mostak Gausul Hoq consequences for a person's mental and physical health may occur with higher stress level, shorter attention span, memory disorders, difficulty staying organized, setting priorities, managing time, and risk of becoming a shallow user of information.

Idolized knowledge economy also feels consequences. Workers losing productivity, information contamination leads to confusion, mistakes, and poor decisions which cost a lot. I even found the latest research from Basex, a New York analyst firm, with a shocking number which shows that damage of information overload costs the U.S. economy $900 billion a year in lowered employee productivity and reduced innovation.

I almost forgot to mention social impact. Probably all of you heard the latest scandal about fake news during the U.S. presidential elections. It showed an even deeper problem that many people through intensive information feed (Stanford university study suggests 80% millennials) couldn’t distinguish between fake and real news. Just imagine possible harm in the future to the political environment and democracy itself.

How to treat

Recently our team was invited to StartupYard, one of the well-known European accelerator programs. Here we have a chance to meet and discuss this problem with a bunch of highly skilled professionals in the industry. All of them admit information overload is a big issue these days. Importantly we found out what many of these people who build their great careers on knowledge, have a common approach to deal with it.

They actually try to avoid any unnecessary information and spend only as much time on consuming news as it takes to stay briefly informed about the situation in their professional field. Basically, it means that super-relevant information for those people is much more valuable than the popular one. Focusing on what’s relevant helps them to stay highly productive and avoid all unnecessary noise and distractions from today’s click bite media.

The recipe for this disease is to keep it simple, keep it super relevant, avoid distraction.

Technology role

As our biological evolution can’t match a technical one, maybe we need to adopt new technologies to solve this problem, as we always successfully managed to do with all problems we faced? I’m not talking here about installing a processor inside our brain and becoming a cyborg (I am quite sure one day we will witness that). My guess is that during 2016 you heard about artificial intelligence even if you’re not related to the tech industry. The last few years were full of breakthrough points in AI technology. Seeing this and having two founders as engineers of AI on board we are ready to use this new magical technology to build service for helping to find the most relevant content which will reduce the information overload.

Our team during initial product development decided to focus on the news media industry. So do not misunderstand us, we are not trying to solve the pains of the corporate world such as ineffective e-mail, team management service, or ad delivery. We are more excited about solutions to help people on daily basis such as navigating inside the insane amount of information that is floating in a huge internet ocean. How to find a deeply interesting article that could help you improve as an individual, save your time, and most importantly don’t push you beyond your natural limits.

Final word

We started all of this because we believe that it is already a time for someone to seriously take a look into the information overload problem that regular people face on daily basis.

If anyone has ideas or suggestions or just wants to discuss this topic, please feel free to reach out to me and Feedpresso team.

You can find our contacts here: feedpresso.com