Information Bombardment

Information bombardment

Information bombardment is the excess of information which distracts a person in various forms like instant messages, tweets, face book activities, email spasms, TV and books etc. This unmanageable amount of information often leads to problems in decision making ability and impacts productivity. 

Twenty first century is the era of information technology and internet is the backbone of communication. More and more people are connecting to internet continuously and are resulting in an enormous amount of data. The introduction of new technology products each day is making life easy and difficult at the same time.

Today all of the world's total codified information doubles every eleven hours. According to research from the Institute for intellectual Capital Research, the average knowledge worker receives 84 emails in a twenty-four hour period and that number is expected to rise significantly over the next few years. As the pace of technology change accelerates, we are increasingly experiencing a bombardment of information from all dimensions. 

Statistics show that we are interrupted every three minutes during the course of work day. One interesting fact is that even after engaging in multitasking on mobile phones and computers in e-mails , websites , text messages, multi tabs browsers and listening music on iPods, , which is forcing brain to process more and more information at greater and greater speeds, human brain has hardly changed in the last 40, 000 years.

 Dr. Nick Bontis , international keynote speaker said that if we want to survive, we have to adapt efficient information-processing behaviours. This practice is important not only for businesses and companies but also for individuals.

In order to grab as much information as possible, we are failing to learn how to prioritize the information we want over and we don’t want.

Information bombardment is also impacting on the psychology of the active users. Alvin Toffler, an American writer links information bombardment with sensory overload. This phenomenon causes disorientation and lack of responsiveness. 

Information bombardment is also the cause of "information anxiety" which is the gap between the information we understand and the information that we want to understand. Modern day technology devices like Smart phones and tablets that we are using now are often set to receive information in the form of notifications from all possible sources like social networking sites, news applications etc and users are normally jumping from one to another in order to grasp everything. The fear of losing the information make these active users frustrated and socially cut from their surroundings because most of the time they are busy in their smart devices.

Information bombardment also leads to corruption of information. Many individuals add data on internet by copying from other sources which deteriorate the value of original source. This also results in complexity to find the accurate data from a sea of information.

Active smart devices users can turn off their notifications which usually draw their attention and make them suffer in various ways.

People should not forget the importance of being socially active to their surroundings and they should not get completely dependent on their smart devices.