The Information - James Gleick [196]
The information you are receiving is prepared for you in the same way it would be prepared for real commanders by a staff of intelligence officers.… You may instruct these intelligence officers to increase or decrease the amount of information they present to you.… Please check your preference: I would prefer to:
receive much more information
receive a little more information
receive about the same amount of information
receive a little less information
receive much less information.♦
No matter what they chose, their preferences were ignored. The experimenter, not the subjects, predetermined the amount of information. Streufert concluded from the data that “superoptimal” information loads caused poor performance, “yet it should be noted that even at highly superoptimal information loads (i.e., 25 messages per 30-minute period), the subjects are still asking for increased information levels.” Later, he used similar methodology to study the effects of drinking too much coffee.
By the 1980s, researchers were speaking confidently about the “information-load paradigm.”♦ This was a paradigm based on a truism: that people can only “absorb” or “process” a limited amount of information. Various investigators found surfeits causing not only confusion and frustration, but also blurred vision and dishonesty. Experiments themselves had a broad menu of information to process: measurements of memory span; ideas of channel capacity drawn from Shannon; and variations on the theme of signal-to-noise ratio. A common, if dubious, approach to research was direct introspection. One small project in 1998 took as a “community or folk group” graduate students in library and information science at the University of Illinois; all agreed, when asked, that they suffered from information overload, due to “e-mail, meetings, listservs, and in-basket paper piles.”♦ Most felt that a surfeit of information tainted their leisure time as well as their work time. Some reported headaches. The tentative conclusion: information overload is real; also, it is both a “code phrase” and a myth. The research can only press onward.
Having to think of information as a burden is confusing, as Charles Bennett says. “We pay to have newspapers delivered, not taken away.”♦ But the thermodynamics of computation shows that yesterday’s newspaper takes up space that Maxwell’s demon needs for today’s work, and modern experience teaches the same. Forgetting used to be a failing, a waste, a sign of senility. Now it takes effort. It may be as important as remembering.
Facts were once dear; now they are cheap. Once, people would turn to the pages of Whitaker’s Almanack, published yearly in Britain, or the World Almanac, in the United States, to find the names and dates of monarchs and presidents, tables of holidays and high water, sizes and populations of faraway places, or the ships and chief officers of the navy. Lacking the almanac, or seeking an even more obscure fact, they might call on a man or woman of experience behind a desk at a public library. When George Bernard Shaw needed the whereabouts of the nearest crematorium—his wife was dying—he opened the almanac and was aggrieved. “I have just found an astonishing omission in Whitaker,” he wrote to the editor. “As the desired information is just what one goes to your invaluable almanack for, may I suggest that a list of the 58 crematoria now working in the country, and instructions what to do, would be a very desirable addition.”♦ His letter is poignant. He does not mention his wife—only “a case of serious illness”—and refers to himself as “the bereaved enquirer.” Shaw had a telegraph address and a telephone but took it for granted that facts were to be found in print.
For many, the telephone had already begun to