Information Overload

(I had earlier posted this as "Information Overdose", but after doing a little research, I discovered that other researchers have given it the name "Information Overload". Hence I'm reposting this with a new title. More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_overload)

The modern and post-modern world have increased several-fold the number of ways we can communicate with each other. The telephone, facsimile, email, etc. were unavailable as recently as a few decades ago to most of the world's population, and while they have been useful as a communication tool, this has resulted in an unfortunate side-effect of what I would call "Information Overdose". I would argue that most people in the post-modern world have a problem processing more information than they can handle, and this problem is likely to get worse in the coming decades.

For example, emails have brought us closer by facilitating communication between continents at the click of a mouse, but unfortunately, we also get a large amount of "junk" in our Inbox everyday. I'm not only referring to the problem of "spam" emails, but also to those emails that are irrelevant to our lives that we receive since we're part of a mailing list, or work-related emails that are really not our immediate responsibility. I had been away on vacation for 4 weeks, and when I returned, I found 281 unanswered emails in my Inbox! Only a small number of those emails were directly related to my job function (I would estimate about a third), while some were only to "keep me in the loop", and many were quite irrelevant to my job function or even my interests. I'm quite sure that I'm not unusual in this situation, and that most people feel overwhelmed with the number of emails they have to respond to on a daily basis, and dealing with emails that are unrelated to their work and interests.