Information “overload” and the 24-hour News Channels

So it’s politics season. With less than 6 weeks left until the election, more people (hopefully) start paying attention to the news. Most likely, they get their news from CNN or Fox, the 24-hour cable channels. They seem like a good idea - constant information that can be accessed at any time. There is no more having to stay up until 10 PM to get the news.

Leave it to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (in an Entertainment Weekly interview) to discuss the human factors of this information overload (emphasis mine):

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You guys regularly make a mockery of the 24-hour news networks. Do you see anything good about the format?

[snip]


STEPHEN COLBERT: There’s not more news now than there was when we were kids. There’s the same amount from when it was just Cronkite. And the easiest way to fill it is to have someone’s opinion on it. Then you have an opposite opinion, and then you have a mishmash of fact and opinion, and you leave it the least informed you can possibly be.

STEWART: We’ve got three financial networks on all day. The bottom falls out of the credit market, and they were all running around. On CNBC I saw a guy talking to eight people in [eight different onscreen] boxes, and they were all like, ”I don’t know!” It’d be like if Hurricane Ike hit, and you put on the Weather Channel, and they were yelling, ”I don’t know what the f— is going on! I’m getting wet and it’s windy and I don’t know why and it’s making me sad! Maybe the president could come down and put up some sort of windscreen?” By being on 24 hours a day, you begin to not be able to tell what’s salient anymore.

Not being able to tell what’s salient anymore. Amongst all the e-mail and blogs and 24-hour cable news chatter, we can’t tell what’s salient anymore. Googling the term “information overload” gets around 2 million hits, and it’s the new buzzword used to describe the phenomenon of people who can’t manage their e-mail, websites, or other information sources. This is new - within the past decade for most people - and they just can’t cope with it.

The computer scientists’ answer is, of course, technology based. Build better software that can help you condense the information. Better spam filters, RSS feeds to bring information to you, and the list goes on. Yes, the problem of information overload was created by software, so software should adapt. But what about the human? Information isn’t going away; people need to adapt to and learn how to manage this information.

Clay Shirky, a web 2.0 guru, recently gave a wonderful talk on information filtering called “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.” Think about that: it’s not information overload, but a failure of information filtering. People need to learn to better filter the information coming into their brains and decide how best to act on the most relevant stuff.

This gets into the heart of psychology: how do brains pay attention? How can we teach adults to use that knowledge in the real world, and how do we give children the skills to cope with it later? In fact, are the youth of today better equipped to handle all this information? What makes them so? Coping mechanisms? A different brain organization? This all falls into a research area that needs more effort: the psychology of information management. It’ll be huge.