Why we should reduce the amount of generated information | Bharat Ponnaluri

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The amount of information we are generating is rapidly increasing and information can be shared with more people through social media. However, the amount of information we generate is outpacing our ability to process it, which is causing challenges. This decline is demonstrated by a study showing that attention span when using computer declined from 3 minutes in 2004 to 40 seconds in 2023.

For the purposes of this article, I am classifying information as a property of a created object that people look at. For example, computer code that someone types is information. However, if the code is compiled into machine readable code, I don’t consider it information since a person will not be looking at. Automatically generated text is not information if nobody is going to look at it.

Challenges with information overload

Human brains have a limited capacity to process information. The extra information tends to become a net negative. More information means you are receiving information more rapidly. This means more context switching from trying to process information to trying to receive information. The information may also accumulate in your brain, causing an ongoing cost.

Context switching also has a time cost. Also, if you are context switching when trying to process information, unprocessed information will sit in your brain. Even if the time cost of context switching was hypothetically zero, information overload has a significant cost.

For example, let’s say you received 10% more information in an hour than you could process. More than 10% of the information you receive will be unprocessed. In the real world, the 10% of extra information will be spread out over the hour instead of being concentrated at one time period. In a scenario where you prioritize completing processing of a piece of information before moving on, some of your mental capacity will be devoted to prioritizing the 10% of information that you cannot currently process.

Challenges with information overload suggest that we should be careful about tools that allow us to generate output more quickly. This reduces the cost of generating output, which is an incentive that can cause people to generate more output. If people are looking at that output, that means adding to the information overload problem.

However, this doesn’t mean completely getting rid of tools that help you generate more informational output. Used with intention, they can be helpful. For example, when creating pages for this website, I did not log into the server and manually upload a file with HTML website markup. Instead, I used the WordPress content management system(CMS) I set up to type the page content and click the "save" button. The automatically generated HTML code is not extra information since I do not need to look at it.

The WordPress CMS on this website includes a large volume of code. However, it is not adding to the amount of information I need to process. The configuration I set up over a decade ago still works today, and I have never had a reason to look at the CMS server code.

Solutions

While technology can contribute to this issue, I think it is important to avoid the trap of focusing too much on problems with specific technologies. Technologies with positive real-world impact are contributing factors with the Internet being one example. With the Internet, it is important to remember how useful it has been to connect with people and find essential information. I’m finding it useful to also think more about.

The Internet can also be a useful tool for reducing information overload. For example, using an online tool for research can mean spending less time looking at irrelevant information from manually going through sites.

I have been spending more time on lower information activities when a higher information activity doesn’t provide much of a benefit. For example, yesterday I was doing research on population statistics in Arlington County, Virginia during the 1960s and 1970s. I decided to take the extra time to go to a library to look up the information. If I tried to look for the information on the Internet, I probably would have stumbled upon a lot of information that would have difficult to fully process.

At the library, I found information by reading old printed reports from Arlington County. The extra information was relevant to me, since the research was for an article about how neighborhoods in Arlington developed differently. I also took notes with a pen and paper instead of using my laptop. This made it harder to get distracted by the Internet since I would have to take the additional steps of unlocking my phone and opening a web browser.

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