“Just Google it”

When we talk about the way of getting information in this era, youth will tell you to “just Google it”.  There is lots of information that we can get just from our fingertip because there are billions of Google search result in just a second.

The amount of digital data available on the Web every day reaches record of mind-boggling proportions – now more than a zettabyte (10²¹bytes) (Ann Blair, 2010)

Information overload can be a simple notion as receiving too much information.

"Information overload occurs when the volume of the information supply exceed the limited human information processing capacity. Dysfunctional effects such as stress or confusion are the result." (Jacoby et al. 1974, Malhotra, 1982 & Meyer, 1998)

"Information overload occurs when the decision maker estimates to have to handle more information that he / she can efficiently use." (Abdel-Khalik, 1973, Iselin, 1993, O’Reilly, 1980, Haksever & Fisher, 1996)

Indeed, information overload can lead to dependency of youth toward technologies. There are scholars who support that information overload has its dark side.

"Yes, overload creates problems, but it has also inspired important solution – methods of selecting, summarizing, sorting and storing first devised centuries ago and that still work today, as well as new ones no doubt forthcoming." (Ann Blair,2010)

"Many of our technologies will no doubt rapidly seem obsolete, but, we can hope, not human attention and judgment, which should continue to be central components of thoughtful information management." (Ann Blair, 2010)

From the paragraph above, Ann Blair mentioned that human judgment will not soon be supplanted by computer. Technology can both help and hurt the process of learning good thinking skill. (Harry Keller, 2010)

"The burden of a heavy information load will confuse the individual; affect his ability to set prior information harder to recall." (Schick et al., 1990)

But there are also scholars who disagree with this where by information overload can help us to learn the better way of organize information that we get.

"Information sharing could also fit under the recently developed term ‘information logistics’ and Chaffe’s(2011) defined this as the process of acquiring, maintaining, transporting and compiling information within and among entities’ is used." (Aron Chibba & Jonas Rundquist, 2009)

Information overload can help us to learn about managing information well but it didn't concern about context in the third world countries or developing countries for example in Malaysia. This is because information is dominated by the first world countries like United State. We are accepting information blindly without question our self the meaning behind the information or the history of the information. Information never originates in a void. 

Bill Kovach & Tom Rosenstiel (2010) tells us that it is important, as we try to navigate our new world, not to be naive. We should take a breath and look back as well as look forward.

Information overload is not a new issue whereby information overload started when printing invests.

"But actually information overload has very deep roots: signs of information overload were present already in the accumulation of manuscript texts in pre- modern culture and were further accelerated by the introduction of printing." (Ann Blair, 2011)

"As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of book will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from book as from the direct study of the whole universe." (Daniel Rosenberg, 2003)

Besides, information overload has started early, technologies nowadays contribute to information overload. This is because Simon P. Anderson & André de Palma (2012) mentioned that lower communication costs are one obvious cause of a surfeit of information; spam email is an everyday manifestation of the problem.

These are the question we should ask before believing in certain information:

How do we differentiate the truth?  There is information from different sources and what are the reliable sources? Are the reliable sources having the correct message? Did we criticize all information that we get or do we just accept the information blindly?

Yes, we can get whatever information we need, but there is information which needs us to think critically about the context and content before using it blindly.



Written by,
Foong Siew Dien