Honestly there are some days that I wish I could just stop trying to “figure it all out” and just learn how to “BE” in the eastern philosophy sense of the word. But I don’t think that’s what I was designed for. I’m built to try to understand the way that some people were built to cook, program, write, paint, weave baskets underwater, etc. I know that essentially I will never have the whole world figured out – in fact, I will consider myself successful if I die understanding .01% of the world, myself, and my fellow human beings. I oscillate between thinking that the meaning of everything is far too complex for our ‘simple’ brains to fathom or far too simple for our complex brains to accept.
I always feel like I’m on the verge of a sudden burst of understanding or insight, and I’ll admit that sometimes it feels very similar to being on the verge of going crazy! I feel like my mind is painting a picture of something that I can’t yet articulate, but I keep trying to feed it information in hopes that eventually the canvass in my brain will reveal something that I can translate into words.
Right now I keep thinking about the principle of cognitive load and how it’s going to play a role in our future. I can’t stop thinking about it – every day, every second. I suppose more appropriately I think about “cognitive overload” also referred to as information overload a la Wikipedia…
“Information overload” is a term popularized by Alvin Toffler that refers to the difficulty a person can have understanding an issue and making decisions that can be caused by the presence of too much information. [1] The term itself is mentioned in a 1964 book by Bertram Gross, The Managing of Organizations.[2]
I recently joined a taskforce here at Wharton with the goal of unifying the many forms of Content Management Systems that exist across the university. My subgroup’s specific task is to write a document about why content management matters. Although my initial Google search on the subject yielded less than ideal results, my instincts on the subject matter return to the information overload theories.
They said “CONTENT IS KING!” and we all rushed forth to develop killer content and we continue to do so every day. But with the ever growing amount of content, context is becoming increasingly important. How do we keep creating more content without drowning our citizens in a sea of information? Did you notice how more and more websites are making use of show/hide functions? Look at Facebook and ITunes… they only show you the beginning of comments or information about a band… if you dare want to see more, you click “more…”. It’s nice, I like it – it gives me control over the amount of information I receive at once. I think users will increasingly demand this kind of control over information they are viewing.
I generalize a lot from my own experience and I know there are certain dangers associated with generalizing to the lot of humanity from one perspective. But it’s where my questions arise initially and then I go forth on a Google spree to see where it leads me and to see if others are asking the same questions. I have yet to find a question that someone didn’t already ask and/or attempt to answer – how humbling and tremendously comforting. In my own experience lately, I feel a bit overwhelmed constantly checking my text messages, my multiple inboxes, my social networks, keeping up with blogs, checking the blackboard sites for my classes, reading books, trying to stay in shape, trying to maintain a social life. I know there are ways to combine certain things to make life easier: ex., adding your RSS feed to your Outlook so that checking your inbox and keeping up with your favorite blogs becomes rather synonymous or reading a book while walking slowly on the treadmill so that I can stay in shape and read at the same time. I know I could also limit my time spent in most of these domains – particularly the social networks and texting. Yet I feel some kind of strange love/hate dichotomy for both – some days I want to live without them and other days I wonder how I could ever live without them.
I don’t see the excessive information going away anytime soon nor do I see it as an entirely negative thing. It’s great that information about the world is literally at the tips of my dexterous albeit on the verge of becoming arthritic fingertips. I just feel as though it has slightly created a new problem that we will have to confront eventually. When we are developing new technologies or designing new courses, we will have to be aware of how much information is TOO MUCH and how can we give our users control over how much information they see at one time?
This is partially fueled by my interest in cognitive load theories, the book The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More, involvement with the content management taskforce, and an article from last march in the LA Times: Social Networking Hasn’t Expanded Our ‘Monkeyspheres’. I also HIGHLY recommend reading the article written by David Wong that the LA Times article references. As they suggest, it’s an interesting read full of humor and foul language, so please read it at your own discretion and if you are offended easily… don’t read it. Regardless, both articles seems to suggest that humans can only handle having a certain number of friends in their social sphere. All very fascinating. It seems that modern society is testing the limitations of various faculties of the human mind: our threshold for information, our threshold for social connections, our threshold for energy (as they say that our generation has less leisure time than any previous generation). I’m not judging any of these as negative or positive forces, but I think they will inevitably force us to reevaluate our coping mechanisms and to assess our own personal limits so that we can find ways to navigate a world that is placing new demands upon somewhat primitive systems in our brains.