Knowledge Overload

While a variety of opinions exist on what knowledge brings to people, some researchers labelled information as “Information Glut or Smog”. these are terms which rise controversial arguments when describing and characterizing information quality. These two phrases are associated and paired with modern information age (Denning, 2006), (Shenk, 1998), (Fox, 1998) that involves information retrievals through modern technologies and effected information seekers at either workplace or users on the internet.

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As discussed in the previous section (Concepts of Information), knowledge is the outcome of users ability to process information. This to gain skills or experience that will help them to fulfil and achieve pre-set goals or help them to complete a task or business process and so forth. What if the knowledge users seek is the cause of their anxiety and deterioration in their progress at work, school or their day to day tasks?.

This section discusses the negative impact on user of knowledge disseminated in two knowledge intensive environment (academia and workplace). The discussion looks at the unexpected information that resulted into Information Pollution and knowledge Overload (KO).

Concerns of information pollution and KO loom as pair in the modern information age. Bray in his work examines IO from a different angle, and questions whether ISs professionals can think of a method that will help them address the challenge of information pollution and KO. Bary investigated the problem of Knowledge workers, who are victims of IO at workplace (Bray, 2008).

Studies indicates that in 1900 there were 9000 scientific articles published, in 1950 the number of articles is 10 times more (90000 article in a year) and by the end of the 20th century 900000 articles were published. All these articles are digitised to allow easy access to information. Hence, Bray presents an interesting argument in his article that claims information pollution is viewed as “positive global movement empowering

individuals to access and produce knowledge globally”.

Consequently, any individual can find any information on the internet and analyse it, and produce a mix of new media or a bit of information (Bray, 2008). Thus, the slight change in the original piece of information created new information that will trigger information consumers to think that they need to obtain this new information to feed their knowledge. Therefore, users pollute their cognitive ability with additional information processing that they believe they need.

For several years ISs professionals were occupied by their obsession to design usability and user expectations, in insure successful transaction of knowledge and organizational performance. The dissemination methods of information was the main cause of information pollution. Therefore, at workplace KO resulted into lost productivity, working overtime and decline leisure time.

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Accordingly, Bray suggests to study ISs artefacts and not only include augmented effects on the cognitive capabilities of individuals, but also those of groups and organizations must be taken into account. Thus, detail aspects of the IS artefact that conserve memories and process capabilities of individuals. Furthermore, Bray advices to utilise IS in better ways of use and design to attract human interactions and decisions when confronted with knowledge overload (Bray, 2008).

Controlling the flood of incoming information is very challenging in the 21st century. The available range of information on thousands of news websites, blogs, forums, photo/video sharing websites, academic journals, and the non-stop google digitalized books creates a huge pile of unread information. Moreover, new inventions, online services, the influence of major sources of information (email, Youtube, Facebook, e- flibraries) on users’ daily activities of information retrieval and new mobile technologies (Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram) makes it impossible for anyone to stay current.

The accommodation of web 2.0 tools enabled information to be available at a blink of an eye. Ken Coatos in his work raised some concerns about academics who struggle to stay current in their discipline. It is very rare to find a discipline that is not affected by the massive growth of information. Thus, academics in any given discipline suffer from inability to keep current and it is even more challenging to those in multi-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary areas. As a result, reading level goes down, the academics becomes more focused on selected readings that will participate in their career rather than keeping up with the latest academic publications (Coates, 2009).

A very simple answer to IO in academia was to rollback to previous methods of knowledge acquisition; (old-knowledge system such as academic journals, books and conferences). Coates suggests to shift users attention from keeping current to focusing on publications in academia to control Knowledge Overload. Although, this solution can work well for academics the problem prolongs because of annual national and international conferences that range in quality, type of audience and attendees results into producing new findings in academia. The point is that such events overload the reader with knowledge and with current technologies. Proceedings of these events are immediately indexed and can now be viewed instantly by reader.

To sum up, knowledge overload is mainly caused by the avalanche of low quality writing that drives good writing out of the picture, and thus it takes over the attention of

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the reader. It’s even more disappointing, says Ken Coatos, “how we currently research

without having impact, speaking but not being heard, and writing without being read. Even worse is our capacity to read deteriorated we read indexes rather than journals, abstracts rather than papers, review essays rather than books” (Coates, 2009).

This section covered two important groups of users of environment where intensive information dissemination caused by modern technologies on the internet. The reason behind choosing these two examples is that academics and workers are victims of knowledge they produce. Furthermore, KO is directly related to utilisation of modern technologies. Last, this research aimed to discuss different type of IO and its influence on information retrievals from the internet.