With the vast influx of social media websites, the need for some people to stay in the loop with the seemingly never ending tide of information can be overwhelming to some. With the constant need to look at their Facebook news stream, update their twitter or read someone else’s blog has reached unpredicted highs. With LinkedIn attracting 33.4 million visitors in May, up 58%;Twitter attracting 27 million visitors which is an increase of 13% from May 2010 and Tumbler reaching 10.7 million visitors, for the first time, in May which is a 166% increase from the previous year. This is now coined by some as information overload
Information overload, first described by Alvin Toffler, is ‘When the individual is plunged into a fast and irregularly changing situation, or a novelty-loaded context ... his predictive accuracy plummets. He can no longer make the reasonably correct assessments on which rational behavior is dependent.’ However, tips on how to effectively minimise the amount of information we consume can be implemented, as suggested by Dawn Foster of Gigaom.com. Firstly, email clutter should be managed, with constant reminders of events, birthdays, friend requests etc. being continually regurgitated from other social mediums; one should turn off the email reminders unless they urgently require them. Pruning requires the user to unfollow or unfriend people that they may not find interesting, as a result the amount of information is reduced to only what the user finds interesting or important. If however you do not want to ‘prune’ someone, an alternative could be to organise the important and unimportant into lists and configure the social medium to display only the information from the important list. Lastly, prioritise the duration of how long you spend on a social media website, smaller exposures to social mediums increase the amount of information you are able to process.
Another way in which to reduce information overload is through the use of the website Bottlenose. Bottlenose picks the news that is most important/interesting to you, with the user being able to customise what they are able to see. The interface of the actual website is also interesting, with the implementation of a brain storm type display, the more important people, trends, businesses etc. are situated towards the centre, with the least gravitating towards the outskirts. Subsequently organising the amount of information one receives and reducing information overload.
Do you suffer from information overload? Would you consider using pro-active ways to organise the information you’re exposed to, or would you implement the use of a website to do this?
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_overload
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-02-01-tech-overload_N.htm
http://gigaom.com/collaboration/tips-for-managing-social-media-information-overload/
http://www.shinyshiny.tv/2011/12/will_bottlenose_change_the_way_we_use_social_media.html
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