Title: Information Overload

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Introduction

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Introduction

Engineers spend up to one-third of their time finding, managing, and using information (Fosmire, 2014). As a result, it can be easy for engineers to start feeling overwhelmed by information, making it difficult for them to assess its credibility and usefulness.

This module will define, identify & explain information overload.

After completing this module, you will be able to:

- Identify when you are feeling overwhelmed with information;
- Articulate examples of information overload;
- Practice and apply techniques to navigate information overload and;
- Understand how navigating information overload relates to the graduate attributes.

Land acknowledgement

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s final report calls for 94 actions toward restoring a balanced relationship between Indigenous peoples and settler communities in this country.

We encourage you to not only acknowledge the traditional territory on which your institution resides, but to also ground this acknowledgement with action.

A great resource for this is Native Land. We also suggest looking at the resources provided by the Xwi7xwa Library, which is a centre for academic and community Indigenous scholarship. Its collections and services reflect Aboriginal approaches to teaching, learning, and research, and it is the only branch of an academic library in Canada that is entirely dedicated to Indigenous materials.

Defining information overload in engineering

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Defining information overload in engineering

The Oxford English Dictionary (2021) defines information overload as the "exposure to or provision of too much information; a problematic situation or state of mental stress arising from this."

As this definition suggests, information overload can cause unnecessary stress and impede your decision-making abilities. As engineers, your ability to identify and overcome information overload will improve the accuracy and efficiency of your work.

Information overload: a history

Even though you’re most likely to hear about information overload in the context of the internet, this phenomenon is not new!

Although the term “information technology” usually brings to mind new advances in computing, an information technology is any medium humans use to record and share information. Throughout the ages, new developments in information technology were often accompanied by concerns about information overload (Blair, 2010).

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One of the earliest forms of information technology involved writing information down on papyrus, parchment, and eventually paper (Hayes, 2018).

Even in ancient times, the practice of recording and storing knowledge left people feeling overwhelmed by information (Blair, 2010). Imagine how overwhelming it must have been to walk into Ancient Egypt’s Royal Library of Alexandria!

Ancient beginnings

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The Renaissance saw another significant advance in information technology, with the invention of the printing press. This new way of printing made it easier to produce books and other written materials for distribution among populations that had not previously had access to such things. For the average person at this time, the invention of the printing press opened a whole new world of information that they would have never been able to access previously.

At the same time as the printing press was producing more new books than ever before, Renaissance scholars were also rediscovering ancient texts, further adding to the feeling that the amount of available information was becoming overwhelming and unmanageable (Blair, 2010).

The Renaissance

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In the centuries that followed the Renaissance, the amount of information average people had access to continued to grow.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries more books were published than ever before, newspaper coverage and circulation improved, and the first magazine was developed (Strother et al., 2012).

The late 19th and early 20th centuries also saw the developments of typewriters and other technologies that made it easier to publish academic materials (Barnett, 1964).

These increases in new information technologies added to the technologies that came before, resulting in more information, and more information formats, than ever before.

Information explosion

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Information is quantifiable and measurable

As the 20th century progressed, engineers began thinking about information in a different more technical way.

In 1948, electrical engineer Claude Shannon suggested that information could be quantified using a “bit” as a unit of measure (Gleick, 2011). Thinking of information in terms of its size, rather than its meaning, was a unique approach that would lead to important technological advances and change the way we think about information in the modern world.

Rather than viewing the world’s information as nearly infinite, researchers have been able to estimate how much digital information is produced year over year. For example, in 2018 an IDC white paper estimated the world’s data would grow from 33 zettabytes to 175 zettabytes in 2025 – with a zettabyte equaling 1 trillion gigabytes Reinsel et al., 2018.

Causes of information overload

With so much information at our fingertips today, it’s not surprising that information overload can become a problem.

Common Causes of Information Overload

There are also elements of the information landscape that can complicate your search for information and contribute to information overload. This section will describe some of these factors.

Ease of duplication and transmission

One side effect of the internet making the production and transmission of information easier than ever before, is that it has also become easier to duplicate information.

This means that in addition to the overwhelming quantity of original information available on the internet, we must also sift through copies and reproductions to find what we’re looking for.

Duplicated information:

- Gives us more sources to search through to find new information;
- Can make it difficult to track down an original source;
- Makes it harder to follow the scholarly or professional conversation;
- Can lead to greater feelings of uncertainty about a topic or the reliability of the information found;
- Can make it difficult to tell the difference between good information that has been verified by multiple sources and false information being duplicated.

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Increase in available channels

In today’s world we have information coming at us all the time, through a variety of different channels.

For example, we receive information through:

- Phone calls;
- Text messaging;
- Email;
- Social media;
- Pop-up notifications;
- Streaming video.

This means you aren’t just contributing to information overload while you’re actively searching for information. As the number of channels increases, it becomes more difficult to take a break from information, even in your personal time.

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Contradictions and inaccuracies in engineering

While you’re looking for information, it can be tempting to search for an objective truth or the “right answer.” This approach can be problematic, as contradictions and disagreement are common within engineering.

Beyond disagreements in the field, the ease of information creation and transmission in the modern era has led to the spread of intentionally misleading or incorrect information, now widely called misinformation.

For a more detailed discussion of misinformation, see the Engineering Literacy module Misinformation, Trust, and Bias.

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No standard method

Unlike many aspects of engineering where there are standards, codes, or established practices that help guide you, comparing and processing different kinds of information has no established method.

Without a set of rules to follow, it can be easy to start feeling uncertain and overwhelmed. Building a strong information skillset takes time, but with practice, finding and evaluating information gets easier!

Low signal-to-noise ratio and engineering

The signal-to-noise ratio, which refers to the ratio of a signal’s power to the power of background interference, was also developed by engineers (Butterfield & Szymanski, 2018).

When looking for information, the signal is high quality information that is relevant for your needs, and the noise is lower quality and/or unrelated information. With so much information available on the internet today, the signal-to-noise ratio is low, meaning you will have to spend more time sorting through the noise to find what you’re looking for.

Check your understanding

Q: Check your knowledge

Information overload only occurs when you’ve found too much information to answer a question.
A: false
If right: Information overload can also occur when you spend too much time interacting with information during your professional and personal life, or when you’re unsure of what information you can trust.

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Confirmation bias

Confirmation bias refers to the tendency for most people to be drawn to and prefer to use information that supports the ideas and perspectives they already hold (Chandler & Munday, 2020).

Confirmation bias can contribute to information overload by causing us to feel added stress and uncertainty toward information that we didn’t expect to find or that contradicts our beliefs.

Information overload can also lead to increased confirmation bias. As people begin feeling overwhelmed with information, their decision-making processes become compromised, leaving them more likely to make biased, emotional decisions about what information to focus on, versus what to ignore (Goette et al., 2020).

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Online accuracy

The internet can make finding information easy; however, the exchange you make for ease of discovery is a possible lack of accuracy.

Part of your professional responsibility as an engineer, is to learn how to identify accurate vs. inaccurate information.

Determining whether or not a source is reliable sometimes requires extra research to see if the information can be verified by other sources or to check the qualifications of an author. These extra steps can add to feelings of information overload.

For more information on how to evaluate sources for credibility and reliability, see the Engineering Literacy module Information Evaluation & Filtering.

Social media

Social media can come in a variety of different forms, from Instagram and TikTok to YouTube and Reddit, and each form of social media allows you to interact with and share information in different ways.

It’s important to remember that even if you are using social media to relax in your personal time, you are still taking in information when you use it. Research shows that taking in additional information through social media can lead to information overload (Lee et al., 2016).

Social media content can also contribute to information overload by leading users to feel like there are too many posts to catch up on, or by facilitating confirmation bias.

Please select the Impacts on learning and Confirmation bias in social media note cards for more details.

Vandenbosch and Higgins (1996) discovered that the way people take in information impacts how they learn.

These authors found that business executives who searched for answers to a problem were more likely to confirm their preexisting beliefs, whereas executives who took the time to scan through the information to better understand problems were more likely to learn new things and change their perspectives.

Think about how this impacts your own learning and problem solving.

If relaxed scanning is more likely to help you learn, then you are more likely to learn new information from social media.

If focused searching is more likely to confirm what you already believe to be true, then searching Reddit to solve a problem might keep you from discovering new perspectives.

Impacts on learning

If you think about your own social media, chances are you primarily interact with friends, family, and others who think like you do.

This is how echo chambers are created. Within your own group of likeminded contacts, you are less likely to learn new information.

If you are actively searching for information on social media, these communities are also more likely to provide an answer you’ll agree with. Plus, being focused on searching will make it more difficult to think outside of the social media echo chamber.

Confirmation bias in social media

Email & online communication in engineering

In addition to social media, most of us also receive information through our various email accounts and other online communication tools. This type of communication is especially critical in professional engineering environments.

Please select the Email and Academic tools note cards for more details.

In a 2011 study, Barley et al. found that the more email an individual handled in a day, the more likely they were to feel the effects of information overload. Between the constant flow of information into our inboxes and the stress surrounding when and how to reply, many people view email as the main source of information related stress in their lives.

Barley et al. (2011) also noted that because people tended to be so focused on the overload caused by email, they were less likely to acknowledge information overload in other areas of their lives, making it more difficult for them to address the problem.

Many of us have separate email accounts for personal, academic, and professional uses, multiplying the amount of email we receive increseas the stress it causes.

As a student, you are also expected to use a variety of academic tools to communicate with your instructors and classmates.

These may include:

- Your institution’s learning management system (e.g. Desire2Learn, Owl, Moodle, or Blackboard);
- Slack;
- Discord;
- Collaboration software like Google Docs or Google Drive;
- Video conferencing software like Microsoft Teams or Zoom.

Making use of so many different tools adds to information overload because each tool organizes and presents information in different ways.

Academic tools

Effects of information overload

Managing information overload is important because it can have negative effects on your mental health and wellbeing, as well as your professional performance.

Effects of information overload

(Strother et al., 2012)

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Satisficing in engineering

Information overload can lead to a decision-making strategy known as “satisficing.”

The term satisficing is a combination of the words satisfy and suffice, and refers to the idea that when there are barriers to making optimal decisions, decision-makers are forced to make decisions that are simply are “good enough” (Simon, 1955).

In the context of research, an engineer who is satisficing would only find enough information to reasonably answer a question or solve a problem, rather than taking the time to dig deeper and make sure they’ve found the best possible answer.

As engineers, you won’t have the time to review every piece of relevant information, but you will have to make sure you have covered enough to make reasonable, informed, ethical decisions. Finding this balance will be easier if you aren’t feeling stressed and overwhelmed by information overload.

Responding to information overload as an engineer

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Responding to information overload as an engineer

Part of responding to information overload is being aware that it exists. Awareness helps you start to think about strategies for working within an information landscape where this is happening.

Two of the main ways you can deal with information overload are:

- Reducing the amount of information you take in each day;
- Enhancing your ability to process the information you encounter.

Savolainen (2007) notes that most people benefit from some combination of these two strategies.

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Reduce amount

The best way to protect against feeling overwhelmed by information is to learn to step away from an information rich environment and take a break.

According to Savolainen (2007) minimizing the amount of information you view and deal with each day can protect against information overload.

It’s important to remember that this does not just apply to the information you encounter in your professional or academic life. If you are still working with information in your spare time. By texting, browsing social media, or streaming video, you are still consuming information.

Try taking a break that doesn’t involve information or text, like taking a walk or listening to instrumental music.

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Enhance ability to process

This strategy for dealing with information overload focuses on dealing with information more efficiently and effectively to prevent or reduce feelings of stress.

Processing strategies could include:

- Using spam filters in your email to screen out irrelevant messages automatically;
- Minimizing distractions so you can give your full attention to a task. For example, turning off push notifications can help you avoid focusing on multiple information tasks at once;
- Creating more specific search queries to bring up more relevant results, giving you less to sort through;
- Learning where the best places are to search for specific types of information;
- Being clear on what types of sources or information will not be helpful for you, so you can quickly disregard them and move on to more useful sources.

While processing information more effectively can help you avoid information overload for longer, it is still important to take regular breaks from information platforms to recharge and prevent becoming overloaded.

Check your understanding

Q: Check your knowledge

What should you do if you feel like you may be experiencing information overload? Select all that apply.
- Watch some funny cat videos on YouTube to recharge. (Incorrect – we love cat videos as much as you, but streaming video still counts as consuming information!)
- Take a break away from text and information. (correct) (Correct!)
- Reflect on how you could optimize the way you deal with information in the future. (correct) (Correct – but we suggest taking a break first!)
- Push through. There’s no time to deal with that right now. (Incorrect – pushing through could cause you to be less effective, make poor decisions, and burn out.)

Final thoughts

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Final thoughts

Engineers have an ethical responsibility to effectively evaluate and integrate information into their work, but information overload can make this difficult.

Information overload has been shown to negatively affect academic and professional performance and decision making (Strother et al., 2012).

As an engineer, you will need to be able to make important decisions that others can count on, but if you are in a state of information overload, your ability to do this is compromised.

Learning to manage information overload now can help you to be a more effective student and build information habits that will continue to serve you into your professional career.

Graduate attributes

3.1.7 Communication skills: An ability to communicate complex engineering concepts within the profession and with society at large. Such ability includes reading, writing, speaking and listening, and the ability to comprehend and write effective reports and design documentation, and to give and effectively respond to clear instructions.

3.1.8 Professionalism: An understanding of the roles and responsibilities of the professional engineer in society, especially the primary role of protection of the public and the public interest.

3.1.10 Ethics and equity: An ability to apply professional ethics, accountability, and equity.

3.1.12 Life-long learning: An ability to identify and to address their own educational needs in a changing world in ways sufficient to maintain their competence and to allow them to contribute to the advancement of knowledge.

References

Barley, S. R., Meyerson, D. E., & Grodal, S. (2011). E-mail as a source and symbol of stress. Organization Science, 22(4), 887-906.

Barnett, M. P. (1964). The information explosion. Nature, 203, 585. https://doi.org/10.1038/203585a0

Blair, A. M. (2010). Too much to know: Managing scholarly information before the modern age. Yale University Press.

Butterfield, A., & Szymanski, J. (2018). Signal-to-noise ratio. In Oxford Dictionary of Electronics and Electrical Engineering. Oxford University Press. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780198725725.001.0001/acref-9780198725725-e-4298

Chandler, D., & Munday, R. (2020). Confirmation bias. In Oxford Dictionary of Media and Communication. Oxford University Press. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780198841838.001.0001/acref-9780198841838-e-3115

Fosmire, M. (2014). Engineering research. In P. Keeran & M. Levine-Clark (Eds.), Research within the disciplines: Foundations for reference and library instruction (pp. 46-49). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Gleick, J. (2011). The information: A history, a theory, a flood. Pantheon Books.

Goette, L., Han, H. J., & Leung, B. T. K. (2020). Information overload and confirmation bias. Cambridge Working Papers in Economics. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.52487

Hayes, L. (2018, May). The three P’s: Papyrus, parchment and paper. The University of Adelaide Library: Rare Books & Manuscripts. https://www.adelaide.edu.au/library/special/exhibitions/cover-to-cover/papyrus/

Lee, A. R., Son, S.- M., & Kim, K. K. (2016). Information and communication technology overload and social networking service fatigue: A stress perspective. Computers in Human Behavior, 55, 51-61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.08.011

Oxford English Dictionary. (2021). Information overload. In OED.com dictionary. Retrieved September 22, 2021, from https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/95568#eid418140

Reinsel, D., Gantz, J., & Rydning, J. (2018). The digitization of the world: From edge to core [White paper]. IDC. https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/our-story/trends/files/idc-seagate-dataage-whitepaper.pdf

Savolainen, R. (2007). Filtering and withdrawing: Strategies for coping with information overload in everyday contexts. Journal of Information Science, 33(5), 611-621. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0165551506077418

Simon, H. A. (1955). A behavioral model of rational choice. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 69(1), 99-118. https://doi.org/10.2307/1884852

Strother, J. B., Ulijn, J. M., & Fazal, Z. (2012). Information overload: An international challenge for professional engineers and technical communicators. John Wiley & Sons.

Vandenbosch, B., & Higgins, C. (1996). Information acquisition and mental models: An investigation into the relationship between behaviour and learning. Information Systems Research, 7(2), 198-214.

Credit & licensing

Content Creators: Kate Mercer, Kari D. Weaver, Stephanie Mutch, Nasser Saleh, Michelle Spence, and Ian Robson.

Instructional and Graphic Designers: Anthony Maocheia-Ricci, Stefaniada Voichita, Stephanie Mutch, Hiba Zubairi, Cathy Sebastian, and Kari D. Weaver.

Additional feedback was generously contributed by many faculty, staff, and students at the University of Waterloo, Queens University, and the University of Toronto.

This module was created with financial support from a 2021 eCampus Ontario Virtual Learning Strategy Grant and is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution-Non Commercial License

(CC 4.0 BY-NC).

This work should be cited as follows:

Mercer, K., Weaver, K.D., Mutch, S., Saleh, N., Spence, M., Robson, I., Maocheia-Ricci, A., Voichita, S., Zubairi, H., & Sebastian, C. (2022). Information overload. eCampus Ontario. Link to repository. Used under CC 4.0 BY-NC.

For more information or to request permission for a non-licensed use, please email libaskus@uwaterloo.ca .

This project was led by individuals who live and work in Waterloo, which is the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee peoples. The University of Waterloo’s main campus is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land granted to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River. Our active work toward reconciliation takes place across our campuses through research, learning, teaching, and community building, and is centralized within our Indigenous Initiatives Office .

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