Overload of Information
There is more information of every type
available now than ever before. How often you ‘personally selected’ at
home, and at work, for the chance of receiving a fabulous holiday – and
some information?
Most of it is junk information – junk
mail, e-mail and junk faxes that you file straight away in the waste
paper bin – guess who personally selected you?
A
computer, of course. They are great for sending out information: more
computers are used for word processing than for any other task.
Computers are amazingly fast at processing some types of data, in
particular financial and numerical data once it has been converted into
electronic digital signals.
There are even programs for
filtering out, or redirecting, certain classes of e-mail, but computers
cannot yet open the morning postbag, sift out the junk and bin it.
So
history is repeating itself: the invention of the typewriter with its
high output of thirty or forty words per minute did not lead us to
employ fewer scribes to write letters and other documents.
Instead
we employed more people to produce much more written work and now the
word processor is having the same effect. The net result is more people
with keyboards skill than ever before, and far more information on every
conceivable subject, competing for our attention and often failing to
get it.
It seems the computer that help us manage
information by processing data after, far from solving our problems,
actually create new problems by adding to the volume, variety and
complexity of information available.
Nevertheless some
organizations thrive in this new environment: they use computers and
modern information systems to make better decisions more quickly,
allowing them to respond faster to customer requirements, which is
markets today brings significant competitive advantage.
Overload of Information
