Instantaneous Overload

A growing problem is that of being confronted with large volumes of ‘information’ in a literature search on a subject of immediate interest. This is the combined result of the reading material availability explosion, the anti-memorization trend in education, the use of unfamiliar specialized language and the decreasing availability of affordable and knowledgeable human sources and intermediaries. These interact with the personal preparedness of the user, which depends on his prior familiarity with the subject and his consequent ability to sift and recognize what is valuable. The more limited his working familiarity with the subject, the greater the negative impact. Much medical, legal, financial and scientific material falls into this category.

People live within a material and social system of growing complexity. They are increasingly called upon to make important decisions that have potentially far reaching implications for themselves and for others. It is both morally and legally expected that they have informed themselves of all the relevant matters that could have a bearing on the consequences, and often they must formally declare that they have done so. However, while all the relevant information may technically be available, in practice it is often impossible to absorb more than a small fraction of it within the time that can be allowed. A frequent outcome is that the ‘informing’ party is legally covered while the other party is actually not properly informed, blindly accepts all the risks and has no defence.

Part of the problem lies with the pursuit of internal efficiency that results in pressures to shift the cost of providing information. Rather than maintaining adequate readily available human expertise, organisations direct their clients to websites and other sources of self-informing material. Thus, a query that might have been answered in a few minutes can take many frustrating hours of independent sifting often to no avail. Sometimes the client has to start developing his own expertise from first principles just to reach the point where he can identify what is relevant! This problem is also increasing in the sphere of tertiary education with the growing emphasis on ‘independent learning’ that is often motivated more by costs than learning principles. The encouragement of independence is laudable, but often it is both excessive and premature.

In fairness, we cannot have it both ways. If we insist on the right to judge for ourselves what is relevant, we have to go through the long process of educating ourselves in the field. If some learned expert creates a summarised, popularised version that the rest of us can digest, it may suit many interested readers, but much will necessarily be over simplified or omitted that may be relevant to more exceptional situations. Often these are precisely the areas that even professionals seldom encounter and the client wishes to clarify for himself. What is ‘relevant’ is governed not by the subject, but by the situation and the objectives of the decision maker. Where these possibilities are extremely diverse, it is impossible to organise the information in any given area efficiently to every possible purpose and it is extremely difficult to be simple, concise and comprehensive at the same time.

Ongoing Overload

There are two important principles related to the volume of stored information - relevance and access. Relevance must be identified and access must be organized. Both of these tasks are time-consuming. However, the former is the more important because access can be organized on a large variety of principles, each if which is more suited to a different purpose. If these tasks are neglected then several problems arise: Disorganized information accumulates where the content is either unknown or is rapidly forgotten. The growing backlog makes the reviewing and organizing task increasingly daunting, and a growing proportion becomes obsolete by the time it is dealt with (which will probably be never). There is also the dilemma of storage and clutter.

How much information should be retained and in what form?

Assuming that storage itself is not the crucial issue, the key factor is ease of search. This might require nothing more than good cataloguing and indexing, but even this comes at a cost in time and effort. However, a further question arises in relation to the form of storage. Paper occupies large amounts of space and requires manual indexing but no intermediate viewing devices. Computer-accessible memory devices such as CD’s, flashdrives etc occupy very little physical space, can hold vast quantities of information and are easily searched using suitable programs, but they require technical intermediary devices (computers and related equipment) to make the information available. When these reading devices break down, access to large volumes of information becomes paralysed, and if they are scrapped due to their obsolescence, the information becomes permanently inaccessible unless it has been converted to a form readable by the more modern equipment. These storage devices also have a much more limited durability and if damaged or corrupted there is a very high risk that all the information on them will be lost. Consequently backing up is essential. All of these processes are also very time-consuming. Regardless of the form in which information is stored, ongoing usefulness depends on regular culling, reviewing, updating and other ‘maintenance’ with a clear emphasis on current relevance or historic significance.

Conclusion

Not having the information one needs when decisions have to be made has obvious costs. Having too much material in the wrong form actually amounts to the same thing. If information is not economically accessible, it is more of a liability than an asset.

"Viewpoints"
©Carl Jacob

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