The Information - James Gleick [195]
Even in 1970, however, Mumford was not thinking about databases or any of the electronic technologies that loomed. He complained about “the multiplication of microfilms.” He also complained about too many books. Without “self-imposed restraints,” he warned, “the overproduction of books will bring about a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance.” Restraints were not imposed. Titles continue to multiply. Books about information glut join the cornucopia; no irony is intended when the online bookseller Amazon.com transmits messages like “Start reading Data Smog on your Kindle in under a minute” and “Surprise me! See a random page in this book.”
The electronic communication technologies arrived so quickly, almost without warning. The word e-mail appeared in print (so far as the OED can determine) in 1982, in Computerworld magazine, which had barely heard reports: “ADR/Email is reportedly easy to use and features simple, English verbs and prompt screens.” Next year, the journal Infosystems declared, “Email promotes movement of information through space.” And the year after that—still a full decade before most people heard the word—a Swedish computer scientist named Jacob Palme at the QZ Computer Center in Stockholm issued a prescient warning—as simple, accurate, and thorough as any that followed in the next decades. Palme began:
Electronic mail system can, if used by many people, cause severe information overload problems. The cause of this problem is that it is so easy to send a message to a large number of people, and that systems are often designed to give the sender too much control of the communication process, and the receiver too little control.…♦
People get too many messages, which they do not have time to read. This also means that the really important messages are difficult to find in a large flow of less important messages.
In the future, when we get larger and larger message systems, and these systems get more and more interconnected, this will be a problem for almost all users of these systems.
He had statistics from his local network: the average message took 2 minutes, 36 seconds to write and just 28 seconds to read. Which would have been fine, except that people could so easily send many copies of the same message.
When psychologists or sociologists try to study information overload with the methods of their disciplines, they get mixed results. As early as 1963, a pair of psychologists set out to quantify the effect of extra information on the process of clinical diagnosis.♦ As they expected, they found that “too much information”—not easy to define, they admitted—often contaminated judgment. They titled their paper “Does One Sometimes Know Too Much?” and somewhat gleefully listed alternative titles, as a bonus: “Never Have So Many Done So Little”; “Are You Getting More Now But Predicting It Less?”; and “Too Much Information Is a Dangerous Thing.” Others tried to measure the effects of information load on blood pressure, heart rhythms, and respiration rates.
One worker in the area was Siegfried Streufert, who reported in a series of papers in the 1960s that the relation between information load and information