The Hinges of Madness: Information Overload

Information overload, as defined by Robert Theobald in an article called, “Should Men Compete With Machines,” in The Nation in April of 1966, is, “an inability to absorb more than a certain amount of experience in a given time,” although the concepts of sensory overload are traced back to Georg Simmel’s influential article, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” which he wrote in 1903. In it Simmel wrote, “…we’ll cope with the onrush of ‘violent stimuli’ by becoming more head than heart, by becoming indifferent, by becoming numb.” Later still, Alvin Toffler wrote in Future Shock about when, “The amount of information we’re given in the modern world can exceed our ‘channel capacity’ and our brain’s processing power – we become unhinged…, Sanity itself thus hinges” on avoiding information overload.

David Weinberger in KMWorld Magazine posted his perspective on information paranoia thusly, “This is a remarkable story of adaptation. What we thought as a predicament that would destroy our ability to make rational decisions and might even drive us mad has now become simply our environment. It’s where we live. Rather than fleeing from the overload of information, our concern is that we’re not getting enough of it. We have adapted well.”

It’s a point well-taken. We have, in a very short time, adapted our eye-tracking, scanning and recognition behaviors, information processing times, and developed new physical and social behaviors (as well as hardware and software developments!) to manage the onslaught of information. All of this development as a species around information processing makes each of us painfully aware of interactive experiences that have not kept up with the pace of change. We are not “passive receptacles” on which information overload is inflicted as Barry Schwartz pointed out in Social Psychology in March of 1978, rather we are learning extremely fast what constitutes good user experience, trusted content, and proper information mapping.

Even when we are outside of or ignorant to the formal research being done in these fields – we base our experiences on simple definitions, like we do at the eye doctor, “Better one or better two.” By offering and creating smart choices for the interactive user, we coach the visitor on a very subtle, nonlinear level to move backwards, forwards or sideways – these really are the choices. At some point, you must understand your interactive design on this primary level from one end to the other.